The Giving Tree

Phil Gurnee ♦ March 14, 2017 ♦ Leave a comment

The children’s classic book “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein was probably a mainstay in every parent’s library/kindle or elementary school library for the past fifty years even though the meaning of the book has been hotly debated.

I personally always thought the kid was a selfish prick who didn’t deserve the stump to sit on, but as I’ve aged I had to cut down many a tree. Right now I have a massive old Pine Tree that looms over my house with some fairly large cracks.  In the last ten years,  two huge limbs have sunk down to quietly rest on the driveway doing as little damage as possible waiting to be set free from the main trunk as their weight eventually proved untenable.  With the recent rains and winds,  I crossed my fingers that he would continue to adorn my front yard and unlike many others trees in the valley he continued to stand guard.

Soon I’m going to have to cut that tree down and when I do I’ll leave a stump much like the photo you see at the top. I’ve grown several pine trees from little seedlings from that tree. I let one grow about 10 yards from the original knowing that one day he would take the place of the original.

Pappa

and Junior

Junior

That photo at the top came to me from the NY Times with this story:

And Finally …

Seeing a stump where a tree once stood in Oakland, a passer-by was apparently reminded of the children’s book “The Giving Tree.”

With the stump as a canvas, the person wrote a quote from the Shel Silverstein classic about a tree that gives everything — its apples, branches, and trunk — for the love of a boy.

After a tree was cut down in Oakland, someone wrote lines from Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree” on the stump. Phoebe Calef