EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY:  There’s more to a tree

I was walking near my neighborhood on a recent sunny morning and saw three people standing stock still in the middle of the street, looking up. I followed their gaze. Was it a cool bird? That would get my immediate attention. Nope. So wide it was hanging over the street, nearly touching the branches reaching up on the other side of the road, was a tree. Its cone-shaped canopy was dotted with cone-shaped pink flowers.

“Do you know what it is?” one of the gazers asked me as I came closer.

I wanted to answer “a tree” but I am not my most sarcastic sibling so I refrained and instead said, “No.”

“I Googled it,” she said, using the function Google has to take a picture and seek an identity. The answer came back in Latin and thus was not much help to her. I smiled sympathetically and walked on, telling myself I would search “cone-shaped tree with cone-shaped pink flowers” when I got home, not because I needed to know, but because I’m a helper by nature and she needed an answer. That she was a stranger and I’d have no way to communicate the information to her is an annoying little detail, you non-Mr. Rogers fans out there. But when I got home I got distracted and the tree’s name remained a mystery to me if not to her.

In an odd coincidence, my son visited the local bookstore last weekend and on an impulse bought me a book that was displayed near the counter. He was excited to give it to me, saying, “This book has your name all over it!” The cover had a small green tree and its title, “How to be More Tree: Essential Life Lessons for Perennial Happiness” was actually right up my alley. I’m always looking for shortcuts to happiness, I just never looked at trees as a potential source for the lasting kind, never mind life lessons.

Then I took a walk with my friend Phyllis. We met at her house and I saw again the tree she has growing in her living room. At least she thinks it’s a tree. It’s been there since she and her husband bought the house 45 years ago. It’s massive and super cool and as, Phyllis says, at this point a member of the family. She talks to it, worries over it, is amazed by it. I’m not saying she feels the same way about the tree that she does about her grandchildren but I’m not saying she doesn’t either.

Awareness of trees suddenly abounded in my orbit. But why?

It’s a tradition in some religions and regions, including Judaism, to plant a tree when a baby is born. We planted a four-foot-tall sugar maple for our firstborn and, when his sister arrived, a white kousa dogwood next to it. I liked the idea of marking their births but didn’t give much thought to the likelihood that these trees’ time on earth would likely outlast our family’s. I wouldn’t actually have really liked the thought back then, fresh in protective mother mode.

The maple is now well over 40 feet and the dogwood about half that. I enjoy them, particularly watching their leaves dance about on a windy day, as I do the subsequent additions of two white birches, a red smoke tree and a Japanese maple. But I admit to the enjoyment being mostly grounded in aesthetics and privacy. Could I learn something from trees, too?

Turns out, more than I could have ever imagined. A friend mentioned a book she had just finished that had blown her mind, and it’s about, you guessed it, trees.

I downloaded the book, “The Hidden Life of Trees,” by German forestry expert Peter Wohlleben. It is not for the faint of heart, or maybe more accurately, the sensitive heart. Did you know trees can be lonely? That parent trees and their offspring actually live together as a family? That they communicate with each other? That they can send out olfactory signals to alert their fellow trees, as well as helpful predators, if an insect or other creature is attacking them? That they feel pain? And help each other with nourishment, keeping even old stumps alive for centuries?

I am still reading and learning, more than can be reflected here. But what I’ve read so far has blown my mind, too.

I recently bought a Japanese umbrella pine tree because I’ve always loved how their needles are shaped like a umbrella, except one that’s been turned inside out by the wind. Mine is about one-foot tall. According to its tag and a friend who has one, it will grow to 30 feet tall and six feet wide. It can live to be over 100 years old, maybe longer depending on the conditions. I will be long gone by then. But I plan to pay attention as it grows, and will learn as much as I can about its needs.

As for the cone-shaped one with the pink-cone flowers? Ultimately, a Google search didn’t come up with a clear answer. If you know, drop us a letter to the editor. Trees deserve our attention. Maybe that’s why they are grabbing mine.

A member of the Marblehead Current’s Board of Directors, Virginia Buckingham is the former chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Port Authority, chief of staff to two Massachusetts governors, deputy editorial page editor for the Boston Herald and author of “On My Watch: A Memoir.”