When summer’s heat reaches its climax, there is a renewed awareness of the benevolence of shade. The outstretched limbs tower above, waving their green fans with indolence and occasional vigor. The motion of a million scraps of parchment creates white noise. A 120-foot oak can send several tons of moisture into the atmosphere in a single year and produce 100,000 leaves. It may lower the temperature in its vicinity by as much as 20 degrees. The sheer busyness that lies behind this diminution of light is remarkable.

We find more than physical relief in these recesses. The moist leaf, the wizened bark, and the statuary of limb contribute to a sense of longevity and inspiring paralysis, as if life were halted and summarized in these enclaves of composure and meditation. It is no surprise Buddha found his path in the shade of a large tree:

“Therefore, with resolution as his only support and companion, he set his mind on Enlightenment and proceeded to the root of a Pipal Tree, where the ground was carpeted with green grass.”

 Cemeteries seem incomplete without living monuments that provide at least a modicum of the “thousand years of gloom” of the yew in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, “who changes not in any gale,/Nor branding summer suns avail.”  Shade shelters the dead and fosters memory.

Trees possess personality and their beckoning shade draws us closer to their idiosyncrasies. The Japanese maple is feminine, almost erotic in a restrained way while an aged oak is paternal, commanding, and indifferent. Lying under shallow-rooted maples, you feel uneasy, as if someone is about to pull the carpet up from under you. No one would even think of lying under an ornamental pear. Why bother? It’s so stingy.

The leaves begin to yellow in August. We dimly perceive a lessening and, before we can experience its full return, shade falls to our feet. The leaves, as Robert Frost put it, “They must go down past things coming up/ They must go down into the dark decayed.”

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