Making toys of trees. Shirley Lanigan underlines the importance of making children aware of the beauty and importance of trees.
When I was small I lived right in the middle of the city. Because of the amount of knowledge which teachers, parents, television and comics of the time gave us on trees, anybody in my class could have passed for a country girl. We were brought out regularly to collect leaves and fruits. We drew them, traced them, took rubbings and stuck them to sheets of paper. Ash keys made good layers on a ballet skirt. Acorn cups made great hats and sycamore keys were brilliant helicopters that fluttered nicely from top windows and bridges.
In most of the comics and annuals that aunts, and pocket money, bought, there was usually a page - between the exploits of ballet dancers, gymnasts and boarding school girls - given over to showing how acorns, chestnuts, pine cones and beech nuts could be used to make things. The finished product never looked quite as it did in the perfect diagrams. But messing about continuously with bits and pieces of greenery like this gave us a familiarity with trees and their different parts.
We played with pussy willows, the gorgeous silky furry catkins. We put them like babies into match boxes and covered them with tissue blankets. It was hardly the stuff of serious botany. Neither was making little figures and ornaments out of the fruits of trees the equivalent of a science lesson. But slowly we absorbed a familiarity with trees, which gave us a real sense of them and a regard for these wonders of nature. Knowledge, inadvertently picked up, stayed with us.
Playing about like this we were exposed to interesting facts. For instance, you could tell a lime leaf by the uneven lobes at the base of the leaves; we found out that some oaks had leaves and acorns held on stalks when the other sort seemed to grow straight from the twig. When we recognise something, and have fond memories of playing with it, we are much more likely to have a care for it. The more exposure we are given to them, the more time we have for trees. The principle is the same as when we give pets to small children. Teaching them to be kind to those pets shows children the huge importance of empathy and kindness to other creatures.
We played with pussy willows, the gorgeous silky furry catkins.
Too many young trees, particularly in housing estates are regularly vandalised, with branches ripped off and whole trees snapped at the base - sometimes by children.
It is heart-breaking to see young trees that should be left to beautify their surroundings, and allowed to grow into great landmarks enhancing their surroundings, torn from the ground. Time must be found again to endear children to trees through whatever ways we can come up with. If it includes going back to senior infants to show children how to make men out of pine cones and oak apples, so be it. Nobody who ever got that close to a tree could cause it harm.