(Lynne Buchanan is one of the members of Kinship Photography Collective who participated in this year’s Global Earth Exchange)

The Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is one of the last old growth forests in the Eastern United States.  It was set aside as a memorial to Joyce Kilmer, who wrote the poem “Trees,” in 1936.  Only one half of one percent of forests in the Southeastern United States are old growth.  This forest has suffered two major blights: the chestnut blight in the 1930s and more recently, the hemlock trees died off from the hemlock woolly adelgid.  In 2010, the forest service blew up the dead trees with explosives, since they were afraid they would fall on visitors.  The lower loop has been completely changed as a result of these blights.  Fortunately, the upper loop contains a lot of tulip poplars up to 400 years old that were not affected.  The recreation trail I went on was closed from February 2020 until November 2022 as a result of flood damage from increased storms and associated rainfall. The Global Earth Exchange was started by Trebbe Johnson, the author of Radical Joy for Hard Times. It is “a worldwide community of people dedicated to bringing meaning, beauty, and value to places that have been damaged by human or natural acts.” Every year people come together to make an offering of beauty to a wounded place.

I chose this place because of the importance of honoring and preserving old growth forests, because of both their rarity and how they contribute to the environment, even when they appear wounded and harmed. It was named for Joyce Kilmer, a poet and journalist who was killed on a battlefield in France in 2018. This is his poem, for those who don’t know or remember it:

Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain:
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

https://www.lynnebuchanan.com/blog/ehmfjjj5hmh6457emb3x2k9szl8rev