A Tree's Tale

The huge, 400-year-old oak tree sees many people come and go during the course of its life as a Mai-Mehtug or "path-tree" to the inland forest

Grade 2-4?Carrier's fictional account of one tree's life covers a broad sweep of history. Native Americans bend an oak sapling to shape it as a trail marker pointing west. Colonists arrive and clear the forest, but the bent oak is spared to serve first as a swinging tree and then as a lookout. Contemporary suburban sprawl almost claims it until an alert man recognizes its unique history as a pointer to the inland forests. The author's focus on these little-known trail markers adds a novel dimension to picture books such as Linda Vieira's The Ever-Living Tree (Walker, 1994) or Bruce Hiscock's The Big Tree (Atheneum, 1991). The pastel, impressionistic quality of the watercolor illustrations lends a romantic overtone to a story of repeated ecological destruction. Even the new housing project is bathed in a soft glow. Yet the pictures are adequate to help introduce a topic that could provide a new twist to units on early North America or about changing landscapes.?Kathy Piehl, Mankato State University, MN
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The long-lived tree as witness to history could almost be a subgenre in picture books, but Carrier (There Was a Hill...) gives this motif a twist?literally. As her story begins, Native Americans choose a sapling in a dense forest and train it to a bent position, so that it becomes a path-tree, or guidepost, along the forest trail. During the colonial period, the tree's distinctive horizontal trunk supports a child's rope-swing; later, it becomes a lookout perch for shipbuilders' children. Over the next 200 years, the tree survives the land's succession from forest to farmland, back to forest and then to contemporary residential development. Complementing misty, softly textured watercolors, Carrier's prose is quiet and finely crafted. For example, she likens the second-growth forest to "a bear's thick winter coat, all new and shiny." She stops just short of personifying the tree as she dramatizes its experiences. An endnote provides further information on path-trees, a few of which survive in the Great Lakes region. Ages 4-8.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ages 5^-8. Carrier tells the 400-year history of an oak tree on the East Coast of North America, from the sprouting of its first acorn to the placement of a historical marker nearby. Native Americans bent the tree as a sapling to mark their path. Because of its unusual shape, the tree was spared the axes of European settlers in the mid-1600s, villagers, the late 1700s, and construction workers in the late 1900s. Simple, poetic words describe the changes in the landscape around the tree through the centuries. The lovely watercolor illustrations are executed in soft, pastel shades with darker undertones and luminous, white highlights. The history of trail trees is described in an endnote to this thoughtful, quiet story. Carolyn Phelan