Growing Trees and Gardens At Home as Part of the Family's Lifestyle

When my baby daughter was ready to lose her umbilical cord, my husband and I planned to carry out her Native American birth mother’s tradition of burying it in a particular outdoor place. That place would hold special and dear significance and relationship in her life. We buried the cord under a blossoming yellow tree near our home, as I was thinking to give her a sense of importance to the home. But as she has grown, in fact, it is the sights, smells and very stance of bushes and trees that draw her delight. They are the spring board to her awareness of all that is around her. And whether it is a real bush or tree, even a tree-like structure, or pattern, nothing misses out on her urge to embrace it and know it. Does this inclination have something to do with her Native American heritage? We do know that in Native American culture traditionally, land and trees have an interdependent relationship and there is a closeness and awareness of the trees the insects, the nature around. Culturally and historically this awareness is in the stories that were the basic education every child was brought up with. Whether we know Native American culture or not, isn’t there something imploring about bushes or trees with their “arms stretching out or up? A tree is one of the first pictures we can make as a child. With its arms reaching upward. Native American world would say this is in prayer and thanks. Trees - sitting beside or beneath them, throughout the history of science, religion, fantasy are a source of deep thought, revelations, inventions. What is it that draws us to trees? Why of all aspects of nature is the tree referred to as the Tree of Life?