Tribute to the white poplar

The white polplar is by no means ordinary. I heartily sing its praises.

When you travel by car through Northwest China’s boundless plateau, all you see before you is something like a huge yellow-and-green felt blanket.

Yellow is the soil-uncultivated virgin soil. It is the outer covering of the loess plateau accumulated by Mother Nature several hundred thousand years ago.

Green are the wheat fields signifying man’s triumph over nature. They become a sea of rolling green waves whenever there is a soft breeze.

Seeing the scene, you are reminded of the Chinese expression “mai lang” meaning “rippling wheat” and can not help admiring our forefather’ ingenuity in coining such a happy phrase.

It must have been either the brainwave of a clever scholar, or a linguistic gem sanctioned by long usage. The boundless highland, dominated by yellow and green, is as flat as a whetstone.

Were it not for the distant mountain peaks standing side by side(which, as your naked eyes tell you, are below where you stand), you would probably forget that you are traversing the highland by car. The sight of the scene will probably call up inside you a string of epithets like “spectacular” or “grand”.

Meanwhile, however, your eyes may become weary of watching the same panorama, so much so that you are oblivious of its being spectacular or grand. And you may feel monotony coming on. Yes, it is something monotonous, isn’t it?

Now what will become of your weariness if you suddenly raise your eyes only to catch sight of a distant row of trees (or just a few or only a couple of them) standing there proudly like sentries.

For my part, I couldn’t help but utter an exclamation of surprise!

Those are the white poplars. Though very common in the Northwest China, they are not ordinary trees at all! No, absolutely not!

With straight trunks and branches, white poplars aim high. Their trunks are usually over ten feet tall and, as if wrought by human effort, utterly bare of branches below ten feet.

Their twigs, also like things artificially shaped, all reach out towards the sky and grow close together in a cluster without any sideway growth.

Their broad leaves point upwards, very few slanting sideways, and even fewer hanging upside down.

Their glossy barks are faint light green with hasy silver spots. They stand erect and unbending in the face if north China’s violent wind and slow.

Though they may be only as big as the mouth of a bowl, they strive to grow upwords until they reach the towering height of some twenty feet and stand indomitable against the northwest wind.