A tree’s beauty can feel too delicate to survive the seasons

Evidence

The timber line is at a height of about 11,000 feet, and is singularly well defined. The most attractive tree I have seen is the silver spruce, Abies Englemanii, near of kin to what is often called the balsam fir. Its shape and color are both beautiful. My heart warms towards it, and I frequent all the places where I can find it. It looks as if a soft, blue, silver powder had fallen on its deep-green needles, or as if a bluish hoar-frost, which must melt at noon, were resting upon it. Anyhow, one can hardly believe that the beauty is permanent, and survives the summer heat and the winter cold. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 128

Categorization

• CANDY: The silver spruce looks permanently dusted in bluish hoar-frost that ought to melt at noon but never does — a good elevator fact about high-altitude conifers.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ — the tree famous as a balsam fir relative that reads as grafted, powdered, or frosted; a concrete specimen for the tree-as-character argument.
• XREF: connects to: Aesthetic appreciation of plants can suddenly collapse into traumatic colonial memory — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 759

Broader Connections

• Aesthetic appreciation of plants can suddenly collapse into traumatic colonial memory #responds-to (1.00) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 759