The poet Joyce Kilmer, like Evelyn Waugh the novelist, was a man despite his given name. In each case they were ancestral family surnames. The best known of his 'bad' (i.e. sentimental) but popular (i.e. sentimental) poems began, "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree".

In July, 1918 he died in the Second Battle of the Marne, aged 31.

Someone said that a man should hope for three things in his lifetime - to have a son, to plant a tree and to write a book. This writer has fathered two sons, one of whom did not survive the trauma of being born.

I saw him, briefly, only once before taking a small white box to the cemetery. The second boy, now a man, is Kevin. One remembers what Edgar says to King Lear: "Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither". C.S. Lewis chose those words for his memorial stone.

Now that June is here again and the trees are in full leaf, I think about some that I have known and 'loved' One knows that, properly speaking, we should love people and merely like things.

But some trees have a definite personality. By the way, I also have two daughters in a "balanced family" in which my son has two daughters and each of my girls has two sons.

At age 13, Kevin helped me select and transplant a one metre tall maple sapling, about which more anon. But first, that matter of writing a book. Although in each of the past 18 years I have written 50,000 words for this paper alone, the writing of a book has thus far eluded me. The average novel has 50,000 words, Tolstoi and other Russian authors excepted.

In terms of varied human experience, a lifetime should produce the material for many books but sometimes I feel like one of my students in English who said, "Far from my life suggesting the plot for a novel, up to now it has merely been material for a few magazine articles".

A conservationist might lament that of making many books there is no end and that much publishing means the destruction of too many trees. Those not involved in that kind of deforestation are the legendary and symbolic trees one has known, those in Sherwood Forest and the Forest of Arden and, of course, one's family tree.

In addition, as a schoolboy I wore a blazer on which the crest bore the Latin motto "Velut arbor ita ramus" - "As the tree is, so is the branch".

The implication was something like the admonition that only a good tree produces good fruit. 'Fruit' may not be a felicitous word in some contexts although one is remembers the priest who reminded us that a church should produce spiritual fruit, not religious nuts.

Those of us who went up to the University of Toronto from the University Schools understood the symbolism encountered there. The U of T armorial crest is surmounted by a tree. The motto is "Velut arbor aevo" - "Like a tree in age". or "As a tree grows with the passing of time". Is that the scope of knowledge or the institutional university that expands with age?

If it is the institution that looks forward to growth and influence, should it foresee the possibility of future disintegration into a pluriversity? If so, what might be the corrective factors?

An academic community in which various faculties have no foundational unity is hardly a university.

Leaving those academic considerations aside takesme back to the time at which my son and I planted the tree that still grows on our old property in the Hockley Valley.

My brother John's garden in Burlington, had a magnificent maple on which the leaves turned as red as those on the flag by Thanksgiving each year. Had Kilmer been a Canadian, he might have seen it as a symbol of "stand on guard" patriotism, firmly rooted "on Canada's fair domain" in a frontier region that was once bravely defended.

I wished very much to have a similar tree at "Kintore", our 'country place'. Early in October, 1970, Kevin and I found a sturdy treeling, its leaves already cardinal red, in a densely wooded part of the valley. A gentle rise in a part of our garden occupied mainly by evergreens was the destined place for it. On Thanksgiving morning in 1970 a twelve year old boy and I did the transplanting. The little tree flourished. In 1991 it became the subject of an as yet unpublished children's story, "The Christmas Maple", written for our grandchildren.

I have since had other trees transplanted to a town garden - two Norway maples and a couple of Japanese lilacs. But the tree I now appreciate most is the one that stands between the street and the wrap-around deck of my corner town house. Through its leafy branches that, as I relax there, screen me from all but birds and passing clouds, I often look up and wish that heaven were still just above that bright blue sky and the clouds that sometimes linger for a time, becalmed in it. There is little for one's comfort in what I now know to be endless space up there.

The tree that shelters the deck was still young when I bought my present house ten years ago. Since then my personal 'arbor in aevo' has grown. Hammond Innes, the prolific British author, travelled and researched six months a year and wrote the other six. He also planted many trees to replace, he said, those consumed by the books he read and wrote.

If writing books is not 'my thing', buying them certainly is. Why do so many of us have books about birds and flowers but so few about the largest living things on earth - trees?

Should Canadians not know that a Douglas fir is not a fir tree at all but a species of hemlock? Trees beautify the landscape, shelter songbirds and cleanse the air we breathe. Joyce Kilmer made a good point in that 'bad' poem.