Pleached Hornbeam

Jul 21

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.

Now when I interweave pleached and hornbeam I have an arbor made of wind-light, leaves and hardwood. This is more than enough to get me started.

I have returned from classes where the students’ assignment was to make a list of unlikely paired words — wind moon, green silence, sacrifice chamber, fleeting orbit. I suggested closing your eyes and pointing to a word in a magazine or newspaper, and then to a second word. Do this until you have a list of several paired words that surprise or perplex you. In class we collected their pairs of words in a hat. Each group of three or four picked a few pairs from the hat, and worked together to write a quatrain. Students were encouraged not to try to make sense, but to play with words and sound. The spontaneity and freshness of the lines was delightful:

Her shoes walked the mosaics:
tinted amethyst clay, wandering happiness —
the crooked square rolled away,
chair rest for hummingbird.
Figures folding laundry, unwieldy
feathered paws and charmed wings lifted
sword bone spoke a language of love:
oral vibes from a red rug.
Rock became fluid jazz —
sun flash enlightenment, fingers
on hand
spread like stars.
— Poem by Louise Grunwald, Laura Bennett, Paula McNamee, Judythe Sieck, Eileen Boniecka, Cynthia Torp, Heather Weaver, Linda Elder, Ceci Sorochin, Deb Ellis, Marcia Hocevar, Roz Barhaugh, Katie Barnes and Nancy Orr.

*Pleached hornbeam |* watercolor & pointed brush
© L Doctor

For this post I sat with my sketchbook and repeated “pleached hornbeam”, changing color with my pointed brush as I went down the page. When I got to painting the mythical Hornbeam tree, a phrase came to me: Make the green bird sing again. I don’t know where this phrase came from. I was drawing and painting with the brushes, watercolor and colored pencils that I collected from a dear one whose death occurred at the end of my journey this month. I was surprised by the comfort this phrase gave me, unbidden, the words and the tree becoming a prayer, for it was I that was pleached — grief becoming the song of the green bird returning. The poet Gregory Orr says that there is a book, an invisible anthology, that contains all the poems and songs ever written, here to sustain us. And someone else said: Listen, there’s a word in here you need to become, an emissary the beloved sent.

This is my testimony this morning that you can, as Gregory Orr said, remake your world with words.

*T is for tree |* coloring book page | © L Doctor

Do you experiment with the written word? Find your way, welcoming loss onto the page? I’d love to hear from you.

Our featured artist this month is Birgit Nass. Her work is inspired by the natural world, and her enthusiasm is contagious. To see more of her work, and a link to her website and Instagram click here.