Among the trees I’ve met first in a book, and only later in a forest, my favorite is the paper birch, also known as white birch or canoe birch. As a writer, I’m partial to paper, which you can hear in its Latin species name, Betula papyrifera. Common in the woods of New England, but rare south of the Great Lakes where I grew up, this is the tree Robert Frost celebrated in his poem “Birches,” which I read for the first time in an English class during the spring of my junior year in high school. The following summer I memorized all fifty-nine lines of “Birches,” in hopes of impressing a girl at science camp by reciting it to her on an evening walk. The girl was fifteen, supersmart, and cute to boot; I was sixteen, and dazzled by her. On a night lit by fireflies, we took our walk, and I poured rather more romance into the recitation than Frost had put into the poem, although he did say, “Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better,” which I took as encouragement for courtship. The girl smiled at my theatrics, but didn’t laugh. Five years later, after graduating from different colleges, we got married. That’s the chief source of my affection for paper birches. Midway through my seventies, I’ve lost a few lines from the poem, but I haven’t lost the girl, now a grandmother, who dazzles me still.