Considering the Lilies

An antidote for Tree Blindness

White Rock Lake {photo by by Rae Portraits}

A few years ago, I was blind.

Not from lack of sight, but from apathy. I neither knew nor cared what trees I passed  by every day: I was tree blind. When my husband and I read this New York Times article, we both knew right away that we had spent our lives more or less tree blind. Tree blindness simply means that you don’t know what types of trees you encounter on a daily basis. (To be fair, I was familiar with three: live oak, magnolia, and crepe myrtle. The rest were just…trees.)  

After feeling convicted about our lack of tree knowledge, my husband slowly learned (and then taught me) the names of all the trees we see everyday on our walks. I even helped with some identification, and quite enjoyed my first foray into botany.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely no tree expert. But I can now identify most of the trees my children and I encounter every day on our walks. I now love the spreading brilliant golden canopy of Chinese pistache trees in autumn; walking beneath them is like entering a room lit with 10,000 candles. I love the fuchsia blooms of the Canadian redbud against the stark, bare winter branches each spring. I love the stoic rows of straight-limbed red oaks, standing guard over their bounty of acorn treasure. I love the towering rooms under the massive curved boughs of the American elms; I can imagine wanting to live inside one if I were a child. I love the fluttering, trembling leaves of the young cottonwoods that spring up every year, their roots pressed into the soft soil of the creek bed.

“Suddenly the largest, most conspicuous living beings in my environment were no longer strangers.”¹

Now when we’re out on our walks, each tree is a known friend. After learning to call each tree by its name, I feel a deeper connection to where we live than I had before. I realized that failing to learn the smallest bit of information about the trees I see daily was like living in a house full of books and refusing to open them up.  Each one stood, patiently waiting to be looked at a little more closely–to be considered, as the lilies. 

Consider the lilies. What did Jesus mean when he asked us to “consider” the lilies? The Oxford English Dictionary defines consider: to view or contemplate attentively, to survey, examine, inspect; to fix the mind upon; to think over, meditate or reflect on. Prior to learning the names of our local trees, I hadn’t given them much more than a passing thought. Sure, I acknowledged the beauty of nature, but I had never before stopped to really look closely—to consider— any of it.

One of the sweetest results of our tree identification was hearing my five-year-old son on one of our walks, blithely pointing out and accurately naming many of the trees we passed. “That’s a red oak…there's a Chinese pistache…” I had no idea he’d been paying attention!

Charlotte Mason, British educator and writer, would be so proud. She wrote, “By degrees the children will learn discriminatingly every feature of the landscapes with which they are familiar; and think what a delightful possession for old age and middle life is a series of pictures imaged, feature by feature, in the sunny glow of a child’s mind.”² In Mason’s book “Home Education,” she writes that adults who failed to develop the habit of observation during their childhood years often have hazy and imprecise memories of their childhoods. She says:

“The miserable thing about the childish recollections of most persons is that they are blurred, distorted, incomplete, no more pleasant to look upon than a fractured cup or a torn garment; and the reason is, not that the old scenes are forgotten, but that they were never fully seen.”

Not knowing the types of trees that surround you is like walking among people without faces. Of course you can’t recall who anyone is or differentiate between them because they all look more or less the same. Mason has a cure for tree blindness, though: the habits of observation and expression. She writes, “When a mother asks her children to describe as completely as they can, a scene or landscape in nature, she is “training their powers of observation and expression.”³

In short, when a child stops to consider the lilies, it is unlikely that he will grow up to be tree blind.

Winecup Mallow [Austin, TX]

This habit of identifying trees has changed me. Now, not only do I notice tree varieties wherever we go (which makes travel fascinating as the trees are often completely different when journeying far afield from your native habitats), but it has led to a desire to identify every plant and tree we encounter. This spring, I noticed wildflowers bursting forth everywhere I went. (How had I not noticed before?). I had no idea that my little corner of Texas was so abundantly blessed with so many stunning wildflowers. It was as though someone had handed me a pair of glasses and I was able to see clearly for the first time.

Common Yarrow [Austin, TX]

To quote Mason again, “We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things.”⁴

Let us marvel daily at the beauty of God’s creation, and consider the lilies. Who knows? This simple practice may even prevent blindness.

1. Gabriel Popkin, “Cure Yourself of Tree Blindness, New York Times, Aug 26, 2017

2. Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 47

3. Mason, 46

4. Mason, 61