While reading that an average of 500 hounds come to Amazon’s offices every day, and recalling how South Lake Union has gone to the dogs, I also recalled a conversation I had with a scientist from Vancouver, BC and a passage in one of my favorite chapters, “Street Kids,” of a little book about the kings of life, light, time, and trees. The book is by the German forester Peter Wohlleben, and is available at The Elliot Bay Book Company. It includes a closing note by Suzanne Simard, the Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and the scientist who discovered mother trees deep in the dark and damp forests.
While having drinks with me at McMenamins in Queen Anne around this time last year, Simard (who was in town for a conference at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) explained that city trees are incredibly sad and lonely and hate the soil city planters put them in because it is compact. And to make matters worse, and this is what Wohlleben also says in that excellent chapter (the “street kids” are, of course, city trees): They hate being pissed on by dogs. From the book: “[City trees] have to deal with unsolicited extra fertilizers. Above all, from dogs, which lift their legs at every available trunk. Their urine can burn bark and kill roots.” When your dog is pissing on tree, keep in mind that trees feel pain.
