Even Shakespeare...

...did not try to rhyme the sycamore

I wanted to write about sycamore trees today because I saw many of them, their bark and trunk always a reminder of their uniqueness and stateliness, as I walked in the Westend neighborhood in Frankfurt a few weeks ago.

As I walked down Rossertstrasse I remembered how much I have loved sycamore trees for a very long time.

I lived in a house once on Normandy Street in Ann Arbor that had, and still has, a healthy, old sycamore tree in the front yard. I didn’t think much about it then. But every few years I will make a few turns and go a few miles off of my usual driving routes just to see how the tree is doing. It looks as fine as ever.

Until I looked up sycamore trees (I had to see if anybody in literature had written about sycamore trees) I hadn’t realized that in addition to the Ottomans (I had mentioned the sycamore trees of Istanbul), who admired the trees’ permanence, suggestions of sovereignty, shade and contributions to public life, tree-planters over the years in London, Paris, New York, Rome, Tehran, Kashmir, Greece and southern France have planted sycamore trees in all their public spaces.

Does it not make you think differently about Tehran if you imagine its streets lined with sycamore trees and their planters’ kinship with sycamore lovers around the globe?

What is it about a sycamore?

About literature, only Shakespeare is mentioned, but that’s enough: Benvolio says he saw Romeo early in the morning seeming melancholy and lovesick “underneath the grove of sycamore that westward rooteth from this city side.” He was then, it should be noted, pining for Rosaline and not Juliet. This would have been just outside the city walls of Verona. Whoever does “ myShakespeare” is clearly not a botanist, illustrating the quote with a grove of aspens. But he/she notes interestingly that lovesick and sycamore have same-sounding syllables that may have intrigued Shakespeare.

Sycamore trees live a long time and have big maple-like leaves and in the fall you can recognize them by their little hanging balls, each one a cluster of small seeds. But it is the heft of the trunks and their grayish, mottled bark that sing out “sycamore” to me.

Shakespeare aside, there is even real-life drama and evil connected with sycamore trees, also known as plane trees. A famous tree near Hadrian’s Wall in England was cut down a few years ago by a nefarious, troubled man with a chain saw. (I made up the man and the chain saw — whoever cut the tree down is apparently not known. But not likely a little old lady with an emery board.)

At some point the foresters of Ann Arbor, for whom I have limited admiration on a number of counts, including their savaging of a mulberry tree along the river where I walk (in the name of federal law, according to a workman I talked with one day, who allowed as how he himself had not cut down the tree), decided a number of years ago that they would plant only small-leafed trees in the city. It seemed sensible at the time — little leaves floating down the city’s drains and not requiring collecting in the fall. But now, as I ponder the finer qualities of sycamores, I wonder about those tiny leaves, and how they can possibly elicit in us humans the feelings of dignity and nobility that a sycamore can, not to mention the glorious shade.

I am suddenly reminded of that poem, “Trees”, by Joyce Kilmer, a work that English teachers used to hold up as the worst possible example of a poem that ever existed. It began, “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree…” Was Kilmer thinking of a sycamore? Were the teachers aware that he was killed by a sniper’s bullet at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918 at the age of 31, leaving behind a wife and five children? Without search engines, perhaps not. Might they, and all those who have made great fun of the poem, have been more sympathetic?

I have never thought to mention sycamores in my memoir. Nor any other tree. As close as I have gotten is the pine needles young men used to gather on the island of Büyükada in the Sea of Marmara. They would attach a single blossom of jasmine on the end of each pine needle, creating a fragrant little bouquet that passengers getting off the ferry boats from Istanbul would gladly purchase. A breezy moment of lost romance is what they now represent to me.

And the sycamore tree?

Mercifully, I have never tried to compose a rhyming poem about any tree, including a sycamore.