Gerald W. Aungst

Ketelee­ria tree stolen from the Wash­ing­ton Park Arboretum

Last week a tree was cut down in Seat­tle and is prob­a­bly now sit­ting in someone’s liv­ing room, wrapped in lights, fes­tooned with glit­ter­ing orna­ments, and draped in tin­sel. This would not be much of a story, espe­cially in Decem­ber, except for the fact that the tree in ques­tion was an exceed­ingly rare spec­i­men of Ketelee­ria eve­ly­ni­ana, a conifer native to China, that had been trans­planted ten years ago to the Wash­ing­ton Park Arbore­tum. The staff arrived on Decem­ber 9 to dis­cover that overnight some­one, pre­sum­ably look­ing for a free hol­i­day dec­o­ra­tion, had removed the tree.

Asked about its appear­ance dur­ing an inter­view on NPR, the plant col­lec­tions man­ager for the Arbore­tum, Ran­dall Hitchin, said, “In gen­eral aspect, it looks like a conifer: tall, dark green, sym­met­ri­cal.” Sort of like your run-​​of-​​the-​​mill Christ­mas tree? “In the dark,” Hitchin replied.

Gifted chil­dren can be like the K. eve­ly­ni­ana. To an untrained eye, or to those who don’t know the dif­fer­ence (or care to know, as in the case of the tree thief), most gifted kids look like your typ­i­cal, run-​​of-​​the-​​mill kid. In a class­room of stu­dents, it is often easy to miss the unique qual­i­ties that make them stand out, that make them rare specimens.

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