Real Chocolate and Other Gifts of the Trees

In the northern latitudes extending onto the belt of Arctic tundra you enter a realm of birches, various species giving way to each other as longitudes, soil types and land masses change. The northernmost in the family are shrubs, and there is a yellow birch, a black or sweet birch, a silver birch, and American paper birch, best-known of the clan to Americans, with its white bark curling loose to expose salmon-pink inner patches. The peelable bark has provided generations of craftsworkers with material for canoes, rafts, baskets, cookpots, shelter, footwear, writing paper, toys and fire starter.

A co-worker recently posted that as a child he was afraid of birch trees. I can imagine the child-version of myself, hypothetically, getting the creeps from a crooked white trunk in a night-time woods. Once, long ago there was a contest on the radio with a cash prize for the person who dared the strangest stunt. The winner was a man who ate a whole birch tree, leaves, twigs and all, I can only presume. Size of the tree didn't enter into the story when my sister first told me of it.

A birch was her choice when an art client commissioned me to design a family tree as an anniversary gift for her parents, who live here in birch country where they raised her and two siblings. The project was illuminating on many fronts, triggering a sense of how a tree's form and physics can resonate metaphorically with a family's traits. The listing in my Etsy shop for a family tree made to order asks that the customer choose a favorite variety of tree along with any of the other specifications to depict their family. Trees after all are vital fellow-beings, as individuals and as functioning types on this earth. Moving into abstract realms there are family trees, phone trees, coat trees; they are all symbols of an organization having a common root.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/166374294/custom-family-tree-made-to-order-use

 

Here is homage to the birches from my own writing of 1988, titled The Education of Trees (in Memory of Scott Starling:)
               "Seeds of the birch tree chose rockfield, pocked with bog;
                 Betula lutea (Yellow Birch) peeled a gold rind;
                 Betula papyrifera (Paper Birch) traced cold humus to the Arctic, wrapping its trunks
                 in white lapels, its badges darkening it as its descendants eked from dells on
                 the tundra, recommending reclining postures, which Betula minor (Dwarf Tundra Birch)
                 mastered."
The aesthetics or poetics of these graceful white-barked, orange-barked, silver-and-gold or black-barked trees have been outstanding to generations of people.

Moving to a still larger perspective, where would civilization be without tree-fiber, tree fruit and flavoring, medicinal extracts, shade and of course oxygen, from the full complement of trees ever found on earth?

The tree that bears cacao beans (for chocolate) is described as small, especially in its cultivated state, with white wood and frail branches. The leaves are large, glossy, red at immaturity before changing to green. Picking the pods requires long-handled knives to reach high in the tree, machetes well suited for harvest among the lower branches. Fragile branches and shallow roots typical of the trees used for commercial chocolate prevent climbing to get at the crop by any means. Though most of today's chocolate harvest comes from African countries, another third or so comes out of South America where cacao originated and appears to have been first enjoyed by the Mayans and the Aztecs, its human history going back more than two millennia. Theobroma cacao, the tree's Latin name, means food of the gods.

This household's Meadowlands Chocolate Company offers bean-to-bar chocolate in four varieties, each from a distinct part of South America--Belize, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Each variety has a sub-flavor of its own, in contrast with the chocolate of major brands offered in vending machines and convenience stores or the luxury chocolate offered for Valentine's Day and its equivalents. Meadowlands Chocolate is not candified by dollops of added sugar, or by milk or emulsifiers; instead the unadulterated terroir or unique regional flavor can be discovered and recognized, the taste of the very soil that fed the beans, much the same as with fine wines. My own favorite is the Venezuelan Amazonas, with a warm drawn-out quality that seems a perfect blend of chocolate, sweetness and subtle forest mould. Beans for this product are brought by canoe from within the Amazon region where harvest by hand takes place using the patient methods described above.

Organic cane sugar and organic cocoa beans are the only two ingredients in Meadowlands Chocolate. The bean supplier carries only certified Fair Trade and other certified organic products. Organic certification, in its quest to promise ongoing harmony between the crop plant and its retinue of harvesters, pollinators and land supervisors, clarifies the connection between the artisans and the tree that is their source.

From another perspective, there is a whole jungle of motley crops and beauties and supportive strengths for endless art, music and feasting once you step to the threshold where the tame confronts the wild.