Trees provide touchstones in daughter’s story about farm

Interview with Gayla Marty, author of Memory of Trees.

Marty_Memory coverMost people don’t take much notice of the trees around them every day, but Gayla Marty thinks they should.

While she hasn’t lived there in many years, Marty easily recalls trees on her family’s east-central Minnesota dairy farm, which was settled in 1881 by her Swiss immigrant great-grandparents.

There’s the sturdy, reliable oak that held the swing where she whiled away many a lazy summer afternoon, the narrow spruce by the road that twinkled with Christmas lights each December, the tall white pines that shaded the big farmhouse, the virgin timber cut to construct the dairy barn.

“One of the things I really loved about our farm was the trees,” said Marty, whose first book, “Memory of Trees: A Daughter’s Story of a Family Farm,” will be available in paperback this March.

Published in: The Country Today
By: Heidi Clausen