ON WINTER mornings, as I took our daughter Isabel to her pre-school at the Smithsonian Institution, we could see the glow of sunrise above the Capitol, sometimes turning the Washington Monument pale orange, yellow or even purple. Around the nearby museums there are lindens, hollies, weeping birches and 7-metre-tall saucer magnolias, trees whose shapes and textures made Isabel stop and stare. I recall most vividly the Corylus avellana “Contorta”. In winter, its branches twist and curl as if afflicted by a mysterious disease. It doesn’t grow the way a tree is supposed to.
In 1996, Isabel’s pre-school teachers showed her…
