Barb Lachenbruch is a writer, tree ecophysiologist, substitute teacher, and Emeritus Professor of Forest Biology at Oregon State University. She left the university to spend more time writing, stewarding the land near her cabin, and doing natural history and maple-tapping projects there. A member of the Writeability Guild, Barb had a Vashon Artist Residency, Washington in 2024 and has upcoming ones at PLAYA, eastern Oregon in fall 2026 and Arrowmont, Tennesee in spring 2027.

Her current project is a memoir for which she’s actively seeking an agent.

Publications

Her publications are listed below. You can find her blogposts here and her recent essays at Lessons from Trees, www.barblachenbruch.substack.com.

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In Arthur H. Lachenbruch’s groundbreaking career as a geophysicist, he used observations of terrestrial heat flow and simple, yet powerful mathematical models to deduce temperatures, stresses, and failure patterns in materials at scales from ice-wedge polygons in permafrost to continental and oceanic plates.
. . .

In his final spring at Johns Hopkins, as he was dealing with finishing classes early and interview trips to the University of Chicago and Harvard University for grad school, he was set up on a blind date with Mary Edith Bennett, called Edie. She was a nurse who grew up in rural West Virginia in a Southern Baptist family. He fell asleep on their date, but Edie gave him another chance, and although he headed to the field two weeks later, they exchanged letters all summer. Several weeks after his return, in September 1950, they married. It was a Thursday, and so they celebrated on Thursdays for life.
. . .

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AUDIT OF MY BEE HEART

Young, young, I flew to Oregon grapes for those giggling yellow blossoms, like bells, that gaily gave their pollen and nectar. I visited one, a patch, many patches, and I was smitten until the blooms, with their smooth beauty, shriveled away.

A lesson learned, but not taken to heart.

I went after willow and cherry, the first standoffish, the other unfailingly coy. Too standoffish, too coy.

I found poison oak, madrone, and clover.
Poison oak, always welcomed me at its two houses, the yellow house of pollen and the red house of nectar, but I heard murmurs that something in those houses was unkind.
Madrone—bells, but not so giggling or smooth or simple as the Oregon grapes of my early days. These these bells were cold and unreciprocating when I buzzed my compliment.
And clover, such a ne’er do well, its pink mop, its scent to draw me in. I was drawn in. But never taken; clover doesn’t take a bee the way the bells do.

So I moved on. Leathery nectar wells of cascara, pivoting pedicels of vetch—I tell you, one must be prepared to tumble.

Then raspberry, then thistle, then fireweed whose pollen is inedible and purple besides, but still, had I learned nothing? The fireweed lured me in. Those handsome stalks. Magenta walls. Majestic views. I felt royal, just to visit.

The days have shortened. That would happen, I probably knew.
And dew dampens my prospective loves.

I look into my heart.

It’s clover where I’m most at home, not because of what the others did wrong but because of what the clover did right. It allowed me to land and visit and be me.
It’s clover I seek in the autumn of my life.
Clover, whose head is now white, with its scent more innocent than others.
Clover, who holds me up. I feel fine.  
So welcomed, I hardly care to leave. I hardly care to leave.
Clover, the scent of my life.

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i. Berberis

Mama Berberis knows that Little Berberis thinks of himself as a leaf with thirteen spiny leaflets, but he’s just the latest offshoot from her rhizome. A few weeks ago, he was barely cleared the litter.  As dawn breaks, her little squirt says, “Don’t call me Oregon Grape. I’m not a grape—”

“You don’t choose your name, like you don’t choose your circumstances!” she barks back. She’s tired of that whiny sucker. She managed to break him off her water pipes—the xylem, and got him to grow some spindly roots of his own. But with the sugar pipes—the phloem, she’s his open pantry. Her hard-earned photosynthate flows into that parasitic son anytime he wants a draw. . . .

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Bibit disliked her name intensely, she disliked her brothers, who acted like she didn’t exist, and at this very moment, she disliked the sun, not for the bright patches everywhere, but for the dark ones that made everything in them invisible—because she was searching for a dead baby. . . .

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. . . As we deflated our inner tubes, I realized that I needed to know my son. I had to try harder. A few days later, his school year started. I set my alarm for 6:25 a.m. and called him on his drive in, on his schedule.

Now we were talking. I learned about assignments, meetings, and open houses with no time for dinner first. I heard about the challenges reopened schools were facing—student behavioral issues, changing curricular needs. One day he said, “It’s so obvious the kids are absent for COVID, but their parents don’t report it. They can only keep them home a few days, then send them back, probably still infectious.”

“And all those absences,” I said. “That must make it even harder.”

“Honestly, it barely makes a difference,” he said. “I’m more worried I’ll get sick. I don’t get enough sick leave to quarantine. And we’re so burnt out.”

“Who?”

“Everyone,” he said. “Parents need schools open—the economy’s dead without it. Kids need continuity and a safe space. But Mom, honestly, we need a break. The teachers. While all my friends are working fewer hours from home, my job’s even harder. It’s relentless.”

 “I wish I could help,” I said. I wondered vaguely if I should bring dinners over once a week. . . .

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. . . And then there’s the moment after we’d staked a tube of wire fencing around a tiny oak seedling we’d just found. Dad grinned, a little sideways and conspiratorially, and said, “Now we thatch it.” We pulled up some dry grass and wove it into one side for shade. “Now it’s up to you, little buddy,” he said with the same love he gave me when he’d tell me about plate tectonics at night. In 2011 when Mom and Dad moved out, a dozen of our little buddies still grew. From miniscule to majestic. . . .

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Bi-Mart: Eighty-five stores in the Northwest, bright open spaces, imperceptible music, friendly staff in red or blue smocks—and stuck in the past.

But I have to go there. Our Kmart closed, our Fred Meyer won’t have what I’m looking for, and I know the store is easy to navigate once I get past the red gate, the in-my-face greeter, and my attitude.

Because I’ve tiptoed in a few times—and there’s nothing exactly wrong with the place. It has a simple parking lot—no flattened plantings, no curbs. It has wide aisles and an unassuming layout: electronics to the right, housewares straight in front, with hardware behind. Food and pharmacy are on the left, with camping and sports behind all that. And they always have potting soil out front. Nothing will ever change. But I hear, “Bi-Mart, no. You don’t shop there. It’s for retirees. Good for plastic bins and sometimes hardware. . . .

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I was already fatigued—exhausted. And then I got cold. When I got even colder, I took a swim.

I was a grad student, twenty-two, in a field camp in northern Alaska, and over-eager to fulfill my dream: to study how cold and ice affected establishment of tundra seedlings. The small number of plant types and the harsh, predictable environment made the arctic coastal plain ideal for my study. Ice would test the seedlings’ strength and physiology. The months-long light would show which ones could carry on without a rest. . . .

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Gary insisted we stop for Thai food at a place we used to frequent back when we lived in Berkeley. “To power me through,” he said. Because insisting was what his people did.

And even though I replied, “The kids will hate it,” we went and had Thai all the same. Because going along quietly was what my people did. It didn’t matter how much I’d tell him. Gary would see and hear the consequences soon enough. . . .

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If I held a hammer correctly, the way my father taught me, and then swung it down on a rock, the rock would break. I would have caused that to happen. I would have transferred kinetic energy from my arm to the hammer’s handle and then to the hammer’s head and then to the rock. The energy would cleave bonds in the rock, and release sound and heat. My father taught me all that, long ago. …

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