Henry Thoreau loved trees and saw and wrote about them as few others have. He admired their beauty and found poetic forms and mythic meaning in them. Thoreau studied how trees grew, and he also took them as his spiritual companions. He knew trees so well he could discern their individual character. In short, he spoke their language. In Thoreau and the Language of Trees, Richard Higgins weaves together selections from Thoreau’s writing with photographs to explore the writer’s passion for trees, how he saw them and his imaginative response to them.
The lecture is illustrated with Higgins’ own photographs, as well as Thoreau’s own sketches of trees, and images by the great landscape photographer Herbert Wendell Gleason, who documented Thoreau’s Concord.
Concord resident Richard Higgins is a writer and editor who has explored Thoreau and trees in depth. He was a writer at The Boston Globe for 25 years, is the co-author of Portfolio Life (Wiley) and the editor of four books, including Taking Faith Seriously (Harvard University Press).
Thoreau and the Language of Trees, 7:30 pm, Tuesday, January 28, at First Parish in Concord. $10 donation. (map).
Co-sponsored by The Thoreau Society and the Walden Woods Project.
Hand-colored image from Herbert Wendell Gleason’s Thoreau centenary slide lecture. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Transcendentalism Council of First Parish in Concord 