Thoreau and the basswood tree

In Edward Hoagland’s new collection Sex and the River Styx—in large part a lament for disappearing wilderness—he writes, “A throttled elegy wells in me when I notice a box turtle attempting to cross the road, or a venerable basswood tree (Thoreau’s favorite species) slated for the chainsaw.”

I can only agree with the sentiment, but I was puzzled by the idea that the basswood was Thoreau’s favorite tree. I might have thought it was the shrub oak, about which he wrote “I should not be ashamed to have a shrub oak for my coat-of-arms.” Or the pine, for which he courted controversy by suggesting it might have a kind of immortality. Or the wild apple, to which he devoted an entire essay, and for which he felt an obvious affinity as living on the border between wild and civilized life. Or the maple or scarlet oak, whose blaze of autumn color inspired pages of rhapsody in the Journal.

That he did have a special affection for the basswood, though, is attested by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his funeral address for his friend.

His senses were acute, and he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. He liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He honored certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pondlily, — then the gentian, and the Mikania scandens, and “life-everlasting,” and a bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight, — more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness.

Melilot, by the way, is sweet clover, and MIkania scandens is also known as climbing hempweed, climbing hempvine, or climbing boneset.

(Illustration from DePauw University website.)