Something big and white and cloudy was lurking in the steep canyon below our house. I stood up from my computer and peered out the window for a better look.

A shrub with red berries, a Monterey pine, a rangy bay laurel. Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

It was flowering tree, growing wild.

I’d never noticed that tree before. You can barely see it from our house. It’s surrounded on all sides by more predictable trees: A rangy bay laurel and its offspring. A couple of young and aggressive live oaks. An aging Monterey pine. A gigantic cypress. Also, an anonymous shrub with red berries that I have never much liked. 

But here it is February, early spring in Oakland, California. And a fruit tree – an apple? a plum? – is blossoming right below my back yard.

I went outdoors to get a better look, only to lose sight of the tree entirely. It’s probably a beautiful thing, I thought. But what a waste. All that splendor and no one to pay homage to it.

The hidden tree comes into view as I work my way down the canyon.

I resolved to make my way down the hill later in the week and appreciate that tree up close. Take a picture. Record the poignant, fleeting lives of those white blossoms.

And so, last Friday I grabbed our camera, put on my hiking boots and a pair of old, expendable pants, and made the steep downhill journey through mud, blackberry, sourgrass, and a rotting tree stump.

When I finally reached the hidden tree, I saw that it was a tangled mass of limbs, branches and twigs, many of them dead. Clearly no gardener prunes or tends this tree. It’s on its own. And this season, all on its own, it has produced thousands of small white flowers, each one quietly surging with life and – it seemed to me – intention.

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

I snapped my pictures, but I did not linger under the tree. I couldn’t get much of a foothold on the muddy hillside. Also, my feet were getting wet, and I needed to get back to my writing room. I had work to do.

Picking my way back up the slippery hillside, I felt satisfied that this patch of beauty had not gone unappreciated. I had personally given it its full fifteen minutes of fame.

Back at the house I kicked off my muddy boots and thought about the proverbial tree falling in the woods. If no one hears it crash, does it make a sound?

Likewise, if no one sees this small tree bloom, is it beautiful? What if I hadn’t been here to take note – and a snapshot? Could that cloud of blossoms have been beautiful without me? Without a beholder, is there beauty?

Maybe God is like that tree, hidden, and beautiful whether I show up with my camera or not.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

A plum tree? The result of an apple core I threw down the canyon twenty years ago?