Winter 1999

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: WINTER 1999.]

How the Hawthorn Got Its Shape

A May Watts Lesson

"If buffalo had not grazed out there in the prairie beyond these woods;

if Indians had not hunted the buffalo with prairie fires;

if the prairie fires had not beaten against the edge of the forest;

if the bur oak had not worn a corky bark that kept it from being eliminated along with the thinner-barked trees;

if a farmer who came after the Indians had not turned his cows into this oak opening to graze;

and if hawthorns had not worn stout thorns that kept them from being grazed by the cows,

then we should not have been lunching in a parklike area such as this, and listening to a brown thrasher singing in a hawthorn tree."