Lifelong love affair with trees.

My twin sister and I grew up on a suburban street in Massachusetts whose sides were lined with magnificent overarching maples. The cathedral-like trees seemed somehow hallowed to us, their quiet grace charming our childhood. A verdant umbrella in summer, then a glorious spectacle in autumn, they turned into snow-laden delights of winter, yielding treasures of sugary-sweet icicles. Spring was heralded by spongy bags of green on every bough, when the almost-mystical metamorphosis would begin all over again.

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My love of trees was firmly rooted there and has continued to branch out throughout my life. As a young wife and mother, I discovered the importance of tree conservation while living in the historic Colonial seaside town of Duxbury, Massachusetts. When Pilgrims John and Priscilla Alden of Mayflower fame moved the few miles north from Plymouth in 1627, they found emerald green salt marshes and an upland clothed in maples, pine, and oak. By the early 1800s, however, Duxbury had evolved into one of the nation's largest shipbuilding ports, its 600-700 barques and brigantines known on every ocean. But the cost was a Duxbury stripped of its trees.

That wealthy heyday ended during Civil War days when the town fell into prolonged economic decline--but its forests vigorously regenerated. In 1886, the Duxbury Rural and Historical Society set a conservation tone by buying land to keep the center of town beautiful, later acquiring other key woodland properties. So ingrained was the town's appreciation of trees that by 1970--faced with uncontrolled expansion south of Boston--Duxbury's conservation commission bought 1,800 acres in the 25-square-mile town with the townspeople's enthusiastic approval. Were the Aldens to return today they would happily discover Duxbury is still a jewel by a shining sea--with forests much like those they had trod.

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It was Atlanta, however, that taught me about the utility of trees. In 1982, after moving to this "City in a Forest," I was immediately enchanted by its spring--a blizzard of pink and white Japanese cherry, dogwood, and crabapple blossoms. But in 1985, while interviewing Marcia Bansley, executive director of the newly formed nonprofit Trees Atlanta for an American Forests magazine article, I learned this multicultured, multiethnic city was losing 30 acres of woodlands a day. Volunteering my writing and photography skills, I chronicled the organization's accomplishments for the next 10 years as it got many metro tree ordinances passed while weaving a leafy natural tapestry--tree by tree, site by site, from low-rent housing projects to impressive plantings for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.

Trees Atlanta recently celebrated 20 fruitful years, having planted more than 60,000 shade trees along Atlanta's city streets and neighborhoods, while recruiting 1,500 dedicated volunteers. It annually educates 1,000 children and adults in the proper planting and importance of urban trees: how they scrub the air, inhibit stormwater runoff, cool the atmosphere, and calm the mind.

Trees took me traveling. In December 1986, Marcia and I had attended AMERICAN FORESTS' Third Urban Forestry Conference held in Orlando, Florida. Then-editor Bill Rooney used my photographs to illustrate the conference in the magazine's next issue, which led to my photographing these biennial conferences for many years from coast to coast--NYC to LA, Minneapolis to St. Louis, Missouri. How excitingly informative it was to photograph these gatherings of forestry practitioners, government employees, citizen activists, students, and urban forestry advocates from around the U.S. and world. Not to mention some very environmentally--aware celebrity guest speakers.

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On one assignment I stepped into the crowded elevator in my Minneapolis hotel to look straight into the bright blue eyes of actor Mike Farrell, famous as B.J. Hunnicutt in the "M.A.S.H." television series. I'd never met him before but spontaneously said, "Hi, Mike! I'm going to photograph you tomorrow." "You are?" he replied quizzically as others on the elevator chuckled.

Another was the late movie actor Eddie Albert, who also starred in TV's "Green Acres." Following the Los Angeles conference banquet in 1991, I said to him, "Eddie, as a young bride watching you play a photographer in the movie 'Roman Holiday' with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, I never dreamed that 38 years later I'd be walking arm in arm with you down the marble corridors of LA's Biltmore Hotel!"

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Still another celebrity was legendary folk singer and guitarist Richie Havens, who, in 1969, had opened the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York. He'd later play at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton. Besides his musical career, this Brooklyn-born New Yorker has dedicated his life to children's rights, world peace, and conservation--including many tree-planting programs in the inner city.

A different assignment was photographing world-renowned keyboardist Chuck Leavell of The Rolling Stones and his wife at their 2,200-acre tree farm near Macon, Georgia. When home from touring, he's an enthusiastic, award-winning tree farmer, who has poured years of intense work into their forestlands. What fun my husband and I had as Chuck drove us around his acreage, stopping at his recording studio built from his own lumber, then enjoying a home-cooked meal prepared by his artist-wife, Rose Lane. Looking through her canvases later, I especially admired a watercolor of a vase with flowers. Two weeks later it surprisingly arrived in the mail and has proudly hung on our bedroom wall ever since.

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While trees sustain us, they suffer assault as well--from overdevelopment, from storms like Charleston's 1989 Hurricane Hugo, or from age, disease, or neglect. Two summers ago, I returned to my childhood neighborhood to distressingly discover that all the trees that had once lined the street were gone.

Although I've photographed trees from California redwoods to the South's lush live oaks, nothing has impressed me more than Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, near Robbinsville, North Carolina. It's our last remaining remnant of virgin Appalachian wilderness, where towering trees, shrubs, and wildflowers grow untouched in the same natural setting as when this was unexplored Cherokee hunting ground.

To walk the trails of this primeval forest is to be enthralled. Its hemlock, sycamore, basswood, beech, oak, and yellow poplar trees are as old as 400 years and soar more than 100 feet, while measuring 20 feet in circumference. Those that have fallen remain on the forest floor for nature to work its wondrous way. There's an awesome sense of Deity here, a reminder of the magnificent gift we've all been given--best summed up in the last lines of Joyce Kilmer's famed poem "Trees."

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"Poems are made by fools like me But only God can make a tree."

Nancy Anne Dawe is a photojournalist who lives on Seabrook Island, South Carolina.

story and photos by Nancy Anne Dawe