Pleached Hornbeam

This morning I woke up with a word, well two words I had come across in my reading: pleached hornbeam. Hornbeam struck me because I have a Hornbeam tree growing outside the kitchen window, and it sounds like a tree out of Lord of the Rings. Pleached because I didn’t know what it meant. Some of you gardeners may know that the verb pleach means to braid, to interweave — mostly with vines or branches. It can mean to make or renew by interweaving. Make an arbor, a new way through. After an unusually long time away from home I have returned to the chaos of undone things and the dust and tumble of remaking a 60’s bathroom. I find pleach to be the perfect word…How do I interweave where I have just come from — New Mexico, Chicago, Rhode Island, New York and Colorado — with home here in Kentucky? Pleach can also refer to making a fence. Oh yes, I need to braid the experience of a month long odyssey into a fence, and weave a border around my wandering mind.

As for hornbeam, the reference to horn goes back to the idea of a wind instrument. Now my imagination opens to the obvious — that this tree is an instrument of the wind. It reaches down into the earth and up into the sky, making leaf-branch music, reaching so far into the heavens that another reference to horn is one tip of the crescent moon. This tree music, now touching the moon, calls in the second word beam, as in ray of light. Horn-beam.