On the brow of a hill lay a dragon. Many thought it a statue, for it raised an eyelid but a fraction, glancing across two hundred miles to survey the sea but once in a century. Yet its breath, though season slow, was sufficient to render the land before it most inhospitable, and little if anything would grow there. This tale is not about the dragon. Rather, it is about two trees that did grow there, in the dust gathered between tower-thick wrist and house-high cheek.
They grew there, a dogwood and a pine, in a most undesirable place. The Forest about the hill would not tolerate them any closer. The Forest, you see, did not approve, for they did not merely grow by each other but in one another. They were two trees, quite different, in love.
The pine rose above the dogwood and thought her the most beautiful of mortal trees ever grown. She spread her delicate branches and thought him admirably strong and wise. In this barren and dusty place they found all they desired. They found each other.
Dogwoods, as a general rule, live lives measured in twelves of years, pines lives measured in centuries. This dogwood wrapped her roots about her pine, and was nourished by him. Still, although she did live twice as long as most dogwoods, she did die. The pine saw the tiers of branches she once wreathed in blossoms only for him dry and crumble, felt her roots, cozily wrapped about his, grow soft with rot. And yet, for no reason he could fathom, he lived on. Three more centuries he lived, alone, comforted only by the memory of the one for who he had grown so far from the Forest.
The forest, for its part, never did forgive them their crime. Forests are conservative by nature. And so at last, in his turn, the pine also died, quite alone.
There is a second part to this tale. Deep in the Forest grew an oak. He was a great wolf-tree of an oak, rising high above the general growth, respected and admired by lesser trees. He had also condemned the dogwood and the pine, sending them off in exile to grow, if grow they could, in that most inhospitable place, crouched between the wrist and cheek of a dragon nearly as old as the Forest itself. Faced with banishment for their outlawry, none thought they would indeed leave. Any other trees would have realized the wisdom of the old ways, and grown in far distant parts of the Forest, that none might know if they yet harbored forbidden feelings for each other. That they had indeed grown, and flourished, at least by the standards of that breath-blasted pocket of dust, was a wonder none of the trees saw, for they turned their backs on such. None, that is, save the wolf-tree oak. He saw them grow, saw their romance, and considered it not completely lacking grace.
In time the oak, towering above his fellows, was toppled by a great storm. This is the fate of trees who grow so far above their kind. When he fell a gaping hole was torn in the canopy of the Forest, a new meadow born. When the nearby trees sent their seeds to grow there, there where the sunlight struck through the Forest to its very roots, the seeds failed to colonize the soon grassy spot.
This disturbed the trees, for it was against custom. Still, their respect for the oak was sufficient that they let him have his will, even after death.
Two years after the oak was felled a tumble of squirrels set out from the glade. They were the children of the oak, although so many generations removed they hardly knew of the strong tree which had sheltered their ancestors. A will as strong as the oak's carries force.
The squirrels traveled through the Forests, came to an edge, and continued on. They came at last to a dusty place were no respectable plant would grow, and there they dug. In the dust, caught between decaying roots, they found their quarry. They took it, into the Forest and deep, coming at last back to that glade from which they had set out a season before. For squirrels, this was an adventure worth remembering, a journey which had taken half a lifetime, for those who did indeed make it back. They took what they had found, and buried it again, this time deep inside the rich, dark loam which was the decaying heartwood of the stump, vast and venerable, which was all that remained of the oak. Or, at least all that remained physically.
The following Spring, nothing happened. It was not until the year after that a shoot, tender and shy, grew from the heartwood. Nurtured by the roots of the oak, protected by his spirit, the sapling grew until it was itself a tree. But what a tree! The Forest did not approve, for it was something all together new. Nearly as tall as a pine it was, and with a pine's armored bark, but wide-spread its branches, formed like those of a dogwood. In time it bloomed, four-petaled flowers wide as a bear's face, proportionate to its size. And in the Fall, its great cones hung in clusters, each scale at once shielding and proffering its treasure, a round red berry, large as a wild cherry. And if the creatures of the Forest ate a thousand, yet there were more, a bounty so rich the surfeited squirrels and skunks, pied crowd and crossbills could never have eaten all they buried. So surely some grew after.
This young tree, the unorthodox child of dogwood and pine, became a site for scandal. In its branches were woven nests in which couples unheard of, inspired by the petaled pine, raised their young. A hawk was serenaded by a heron, while below a eagle called to a cassowary. A fox invited a squirrel to dinner, and served tidbit to, rather than of, her. The forest was aghast, and turned its back on this behavior. No respectable tree would grow anywhere near the glade. This, of course, meant that the glade simply grew bigger.
In time these new creatures multiplied to the point where they were as common as the old. Once that had happened, it took only a couple of centuries more until the Forest forgot that they had once been rejected. Indeed, their descendants were among the most vocal when the Forest, half a thousand years later, was swept up by a new scandal. It was a stalking-hawk, with heron-long legs and neck but a hawk's visage and appetite, which first recommended banishment for the rose and his lover, the cherry tree. A few centuries later, was the cherry-rose tree any kinder to the rhododendron which loved a banyan-fern?