What Did Trees Look Like? (and Woods for that matter)

Our trees. The trees of the tallgrass heartland. 

Not artificial trees, but the trees of natural ecosystems. 

 

They were trees of fire – part of a richness that's mostly gone now, but with the ecological restoration of oak woodlands, they’re coming back. And for them to do so, it may be important for us to understand them – in part so that our sense of “successful management” doesn’t “enhance” or disfigure them in a misguided direction. (Some people complain that trees in nature don't look like trees in a park or arboretum.) 

 

Only recently have we started burning wooded ecosystems, and their recovery is in an early stage. There were no "nature photographers" to leave us model images. Perhaps artists who saw remnants of nature can help us learn what to look and hope for. The drawing below of a real bur oak is by Adolph Hoeffler in 1852. The tree remembers and reflects aboriginal times. Its character and history are written all over it. The lower branches were burned off long ago.

Notice that, even with a sensitive artist like Hoeffler, the twenty or so other trees in the drawing get increasingly ill-defined as they recede into the distance. They become closer to “standard trees” – as a kid would draw.

 

Hoeffler’s real tree was clearly a savanna tree. Oak woodland trees were probably somewhat different, though also dependent on fire for their nature. It stirs our minds to look at the renderings of ancient real trees. 

 

One early painter of the Native American landscape was George Catlin. He actually lived for years among the tribes and nations to record their likenesses and ways. He never really drew a tree, but he documented the landscape. In the 1832 painting below …

… Catlin is documenting a Native American with a rifle shooting at some others. The trees do not look all that real. But the natural landscape looks thrillingly real – grassland dominating heights and slopes, scattered savanna trees here and there, little “draws” or “ravines” with varying collections of trees or shrubs, floodplain islands heavily wooded, a prairie edged by a line of trees along the right edge of the river. 

 

In another painting, The subject is “Blackbird’s Grave” – but this time Catlin gets even more gloriously carried away by the landscape.

A detail of this painting …

… includes a rare example of a landscape artist bothering with the flowers. Biodiversity conservationists are thrilled to see them. On this day, it seems rich biodiversity thus revealed itself in the savannas and wood edges. On some other day, the prairie likely would have been bejeweled too. Once again, the trees look wrong, with ridiculously thin trunks, but their placement on the landscape looks like nature.

 

The rest of this post focuses on paintings by Albert Bierstadt, from the mid 1800s: 

 

Here we’re in a woodland. There are few shrubs or small trees. Early travelers described such open woods as the rule in the tallgrass region. The woodland oaks were said to reproduce only sporadically.

 

Prairie and savanna at the edge of a woodland. The outermost tree is dead, likely killed by fire. The next tree has all lower limbs burned off. The next four trees have lower branches re-growing. Below them is an apparent hazel ruff. For more on that, see the next painting. 

 

In the above detail from a larger (mostly open grassland) scene, two trees are contrasted. To the left is the classic savanna tree with just a few lower limbs. To the right is a spreading tree with a hazel ruff beneath. A “ruff” is a thicket of hazelnut shrubs that gets its name from those high, flat-topped Elizabethan collars. Every fire would burn off the hazel (which is very sensitive to fire but a champion re-sprouter). Then following a couple of years without fire, the flat-topped ruff would grow. Further to the right is another grove, without hazel. Perhaps the oak with the ruff grew in a wet depression that was often spared from fires. 

 

The next painting is from the Yosemite valley, farther west. The same fire-pruned trees are present. In this case, careful studies documented how the fire-adapted ecosystem declined during the years when the Park Service excluded fire - and how it has started to recover under prescribed burns. Changes were easy to document in this scenic scene, because it was very much photographed from the earliest days of photography.  

Bierstadt found all his wild nature well west of the Tallgrass Region, where the vast natural landscapes were already gone. But similar fires maintained similar trees. The fires in the tallgrass region could burn higher and hotter because the grasses grew higher and thicker thanks to more plentiful rain. Carefully controlled fires today mostly burn lower.  

 

Two grand old survivors. On the right is a tree that has recovered, and suffered, and recovered again, for centuries. 

 

The next Bierstadt painting, "The Emigrants," shows settlers heading west:

The artist paid most attention to people, cattle, wagon, cliff, and sunset. But he loved real trees. The sunset sanctifies a nobility he recognized in the bones of their ecology.  

A last painting is one that sold for $486,400 in 2005 at a Christie’s auction. Bierstadt does not compete with Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollock. His work was less about art and more about nature. We share his reverie. Very likely there were scenes much like this in the tallgrass region, even if Albert Bierstadt found his models farther west. Original nature was beautiful everywhere. In spring, much of flat Illinois was ponded. 

Those big old trees sure look like oaks. I wish we were able to visit such a place. With good restoration and conservation, some day we could.  

Acknowledgements

George Catlin quit his lawyer job and hurriedly learned to paint in order to document Native American life. He began traveling and painting in 1830 in the company of William Clark (of Lewis and Clark). He went out again on his own four times between 1830 and 1836 – staying carefully beyond "the frontier," where warring between Native Americans and Euro-Americans made travel dangerous. Peaceful villages welcomed him. His documentation of aboriginal America is a great contribution and deserves to be better known.

Adolph Hoeffler is described on the Internet as "an itinerant artist" who came in 1848 from Germany and spent time in the American midwest and in Cuba. 

Albert Bierstadt, a formally trained artist, first travelled west in 1859 with a surveyor to paint wild scenes while they still existed. We are indebted to him. 

Thanks to Christos Economou and Eriko Kojima for proofing and edits.