I HAVE COME TO THE TREE AGAIN, with a data sheet and an offering. That stately tulip tree above the creek in the woods behind our Catskills home, the one I lean my forehead against to speak to someone no longer here, and to give thanks for someone who is. I press my palms to the deeply furrowed bark and say what I came to say. Then I pour a little honey onto the ground beside her roots. I marked her with a yellow ribbon more than a decade ago, the first tree on what would become my phenology trail—a way to track seasonal timing in the living landscape, year after year.

A flicker of sound breaks through the quiet ritual: the faint creak of a leafless branch shifting its burden, the tiny crackle of ice falling from bark. High in the canopy, a male cardinal, backlit by a web of sky, forages among the highest branches, prying seeds from last year’s fruits. If I tilt my head just so, I can take in the whole of him: obsidian eye mask, scandalously scarlet wings and crest, a sturdy flame-colored beak working carefully at dried husks. I could stop here with the pleasure of him.

But today his beauty leads me further in. He’s working his odds in winter. And below, his drab and cheerful mate is, too, as she scours the snow for any oily seeds still bound to the open whorls of the fruit skeletons caught among the roots and fallen branches. Each cluster, no bigger than a child’s fist, is joined at the base, forming a chalice of winged seeds. When these seeds are stripped away, all that remains is a single-pointed spear, woody remnants of the fused female reproductive parts that once jutted from the tulip-shaped flower that bore the seeds. I have seen many children pretend these are tiny swords, surprised when they learn what they really are. The empty stalks are evidence of the seeds’ dispersal—mostly by wind, but perhaps also by the very creatures who now hold my breath in suspension.

Why am I holding my breath? Is it the sudden sense of kinship—that I too come to this tree seeking sustenance? Or am I simply startled to see them feeding here, seeds scattered like spent matchsticks across the snow?

Why am I holding my breath? Is it the sudden sense of kinship—that I too come to this tree seeking sustenance?

I’m embarrassed to admit that as an ecologist focused on plants, I pay close attention to the timing of seed development, but I haven’t paid as much notice to which creatures depend on that winter source of fat and protein when times are lean. The seeds themselves feel like small improbabilities, beginning with the bizarre flower. Palm-size, tulip-shaped, nearly fluorescent green and orange, each bloom produces a deep pool of nectar, rich in proteins uncommon among flowering plants. Honeybees and other pollinators visit these trees in late May and early June, bridging the lean weeks after spring’s great flush of flowers has faded and before the summer bloom begins. A single flower can fill a bee’s honey stomach in one visit. Looking beyond the tree line to the meadow where our hives rest in the snow, I can already taste the unusual flavor of that dark, resinous tulip honey. Some find it strong, even unpleasant. Others long for it.

Liriodendron, in the magnolia family, is a relic of deep time. These trees have been present for more than 100 million years, predating oaks and maples by tens of millions. I try to picture the world as it was then: filtered light slanting across fern valleys, these massive trees towering into the fog while dinosaurs passed through their shadows. Now only two living species remain from that age: Liriodendron chinense, nestled in Asian forests, and Liriodendron tulipifera, the tallest hardwood in North America, growing here in the eastern states with a quiet resilience. Possibly due to its ancient lineage, only 5 to 20 percent of seeds are viable and able to germinate in the modern age. The reasons are debated: limited ability to self-pollinate, pollinator decline, and mismatches in timing between trees and the insects that once evolved alongside them. Science circles around these mysteries, and I sense them all in the gap between this tree and the next.

A few years ago, I coauthored a phenology study estimating a twenty-seven-day shift in flowering time for Liriodendron from the nineteenth century to the present. Seeing a ledger of two-hundred-year-old observations entwined with my own was unsettling—spring pushing ahead by nearly a month for some species, but not others.

Asynchronous is the word scientists use to describe climate-driven misalignment between organisms dependent on one another. That same word, for many of us, might name a life that no longer lines up with what we imagined.

Palms flat against the trunk, I notice my hands have turned cold. A memory arrives unbidden. One afternoon, an elderly neighbor, a dear friend I brought meals to from time to time, looked at me from across her kitchen table, her gaze lingering on the uncertain rise of my belly. “The delicate timing of things can be too much to bear,” she said softly. I forced a smile.

Asynchronous is the word scientists use to describe climate-driven misalignment between organisms dependent on one another. That same word, for many of us, might name a life that no longer lines up with what we imagined.

There had been other times. Other names carefully chosen and quietly let go. “If it all works out this time,” I told her, “we might name the child Lyria, after this tree we visit near the creek.” She only nodded, her hands folded tight in her lap. In all the years I knew her, she never spoke of the decade she spent trying, unsuccessfully, to have a child.

To steady myself, I lift my gaze to the longest view I can manage, following the trunk upward to where the branch tips meet the gray winter sky. The murmur of the half-frozen creek and the straightness of the trunk make it easy to imagine the Indigenous woodland peoples of this land hollowing out canoes from this favored species, sap-soaked wood chips scattered about the half-grown understory of late spring. The old name “canoewood” and the more recent “tulip poplar” both speak to the same qualities—straight grain and a softness unusual for a hardwood, easier to hollow by hand or shape on a lathe than most native species. The trunk leads me again to another tree, in another time. A gigantic tulip, purportedly the tallest and oldest living thing in New York City, estimated to be around four hundred years old. As a child, I met “the Queen’s Giant” on a school field trip. I remember the sudden, unfamiliar pride that something so wild and venerable lived within my dense city. Its trunk was as wide as a road heading west, behind a chain-link fence meant to contain and perhaps protect it. The exposed roots were so large, the city trash caught among them looked small and inconsequential. I don’t remember seeing any flowers.

I certainly didn’t know then that a tulip tree’s flower ovary is receptive for only twelve to twenty-four hours. For a viable seed to form, a pollinator must brush a stamen with fresh pollen in precisely the right way, then fly to another tree’s flower, and touch its receptive stigma inside that narrow window. Eventually, that seed must disperse, by wind or hungry mouth, land somewhere with enough light, freeze through winter, receive ample water come spring, sprout, then push up through deep leaf litter, all while avoiding browsers, chain saws, and boots. It must grow for at least fifteen years before it’s ready to produce its first flower, before it truly belongs to the continuity of the species.

Each seed the cardinals pry loose today is a small archive of this unlikely alignment.

My crimson bird happened to choose this patch of woods to forage today. If he is not taken by a predator, disease, or harsh winter, he will fatten. Soon, he will find and defend a territory, becoming so outrageous in his pre-mating state that he might attack his own reflection in a car door mirror. He will bring his mate her nesting material, feed her while she settles into the long wait, and if they are sufficiently fed—on tulip seeds, perhaps, among others—they will hatch their young.

Or perhaps not. Winter is not the season of assurance, but of holding. Growth pauses, and what persists does so quietly.

But winter ends. It always does. And on that first day the air softens, a honeybee may leave her clustered sisters for a brief cleansing flight, tracing the creek’s cold air before the business of honey-making begins again. She may pass beneath a red crest tucked in the branches of a tall, stately tree. And below them both, a small human form—our daughter Lyria, now ten years old —leans into the tree where her name was first spoken aloud as a hope.

I pour the rest of the honey at her roots, where trunk meets forest floor. Next to my boot, a seed has landed, a barely perceptible imprint in the last of the snow. I didn’t see it spiraling down, as it was well fashioned to do, charting an uncertain flight through the bright air. And so ends, and so begins, the delicate timing of things—for the many who are seeking sustenance from tiny winged seeds on still-frozen ground.

What will become of them is not ours to know.