Everyone was finishing dessert and I left the table to use the restroom, when the conversation turned to forestry, of a sort. It was the wedding rehearsal dinner for my niece and her fiancé, in the village of Mashpee on Cape Cod. While eating his sorbet, the minister said he thought it was silly when couples included the Kahlil Gibram poem about two trees in their ceremony. The poem describes a happy married couple as being like two trees, growing near each other but not in each other’s shade, close yet independent.

 

“Marriage is a union into one,” the minister said.

My husband, still at the table, knew the quote. We had it in our wedding ceremony twenty years ago. “I disagree,” he said. “No matter how loving the marriage, the two people never really become one. They always maintain separate identities. If one person starts to lose their individuality, that leads to an unhealthy relationship.”

The minister gave a bland reply, smoothing over the difference of opinion, and I only heard about the exchange later. “Did you tell him about the marriage trees?” I asked. He hadn’t, and I wished I’d had the chance.

I think of two particular trees along the McKenzie River Trail in Oregon as “the marriage trees.” The two old-growth Douglas-firs grow near each other, very near. One is about six feet in diameter, the other near seven feet in diameter, and both are well over two hundred feet tall. Massive trunks rise straight into the sky, without a knot or a branch for nearly a hundred feet. As seedlings, the two trees were probably about ten feet apart, but at their huge size now, their trunks are nearly touching.

They stand not in each other’s shade. Their canopies are interlaced; branches the size of ordinary trees twist and crook around each other. From the ground, I see a cathedral-like green ceiling, with bits of sky peeking through. But up in the canopies, green needles sparkle in the sunlight, transforming sunlight into sugars; and branches bend to the wind, gentle or fierce. Whole ecosystems live in the hundred-foot-deep canopy—Vaux’s swifts, warblers of several kinds, tree voles, spiders and lichens entirely different from the forest-floor species.

They are individuals, each with its own strong trunk protected by fire-resistant bark at least six inches thick after this many centuries. Each tree is deeply rooted. In fact, the root systems of these trees may weigh as much as their awesome trunks and branches combined. The roots of these old trees reach tens of feet into the ground and spread roots thin as threads through the soil. An entire ecosystem, less known than the canopy world, lives underground. Mycorrhizal fungi live in partnership with the roots, absorbing more minerals and water than the roots could on their own and exchanging those resources for sugars transported down from the canopy. Mites, invertebrates of many kinds, and fungi feed on rotten wood or on each other.

The marriage trees have lived for centuries—five, six, or seven hundred years. Each has a growth ring for every year, a record in its wood of whether it was a good growing season or a drought, whether a fire burned near it or a beetle outbreak stressed it. The trees lived through the same storms, the same sunny days, experienced the same history, and yet each had its own challenges—a falling tree that scraped one but not the other, a tree-disease spore that landed on the needles of one but not the other.

They cannot live forever. Their downfall may be individual or joint. If the top of one tree snaps in a storm, the other might survive with only broken branches and scars from the falling wood—chunks as heavy as concrete gashing even these strong trunks. The root systems, however, are so inextricably entwined underground, that if one falls from a storm or from root rot or heart rot or a flooding McKenzie River, the other will almost certainly fall with it. After they die, the trees will have life of another sort for hundreds more years. As they slowly decompose, their legacies will be vital parts of the forest ecosystem. Their rotting wood will nourish seedling trees, ferns, and shrubs; their softening logs will become the homes of salamanders and trapdoor spiders and hide the nests of deer mice and vagrant shrews.

These are the two trees I was thinking of when the minister at our wedding, twenty years ago, read the Kahlil Gibram poem.

Now, for your final exam in forestry, the essay question: Compare the similarities and differences between these two trees and marriage.