Düsseldorf, Spring 2025
Walking by the harbor today, I stopped again in front of those familiar sculptural trees — the ones that rise up so dramatically along the promenade. Their bare, twisting branches looked like something from another world all winter long. But now, something is shifting. Spring is here, and you can already see the tiniest leaves beginning to push their way forward, softening the sharpness, covering the exposed, reshaping the form.
These are London plane trees, planted widely in European cities for their resilience and beauty. Their bark peels in mottled patterns, their branches are often pruned into rigid lines, and they seem to stand like silent witnesses to whatever unfolds beneath them. I learned today they’re a hybrid species — just like so many of us — made to withstand the grit of city life, the pollution, the extremes. They’ve adapted. They’ve survived. And still, every spring, they soften again.
It struck me how much they mirror us.
We too have that duality. The strong, structured outer self — the one shaped by experience, by necessity, by adaptation. And then there’s the part of us that buds in spring, that softens in warmth, that dares to bloom again after the long, cold season. Just like these trees, we’re not just one thing. We contain our winters and our springs. We grow thorns and we also cradle leaves.
There’s something incredibly comforting in that thought — that what we see on the surface, in others and in ourselves, is never the whole story. What looks dramatic and hardened might be ready to open. What seems soft might have come through the most brutal pruning. And what we think we understand, may only be one version of the truth.
Nature reminds us of this in the most quiet and gentle ways. All we have to do is look closely.
2 responses to “The Trees and What They Hold~”
Lovely post and photos, as always!
thank you so much Jim