Made in the shade | Scene Through the Lens

When tasked with finding “hot weather art” (yes, I talked about that two weeks ago, but stick with me) I often stay close to wherever my newspaper assignments take me that day. The hope is that I will stumble across something new if I avoid heading straight to the usual spots.

I also aim for some kind of context, even if it’s a stretch. During our record-breaking heat wave last week, I heard on news radio that train rails are affected by high temperatures.

Then, rather than heading to a lake in a park, I drove through the neighborhoods thinking I might find somebody outside who is not bothered by the heat.

That somebody happened to be Doug Dash, a retired postal worker, who told me, “When you own a home, you’re never really retired.” He said the tree painting was something he could do in the heat.

We formed a sort of symbiotic relationship there in the shade, tolerating each other. I didn’t question why white and he didn’t wonder why I would take his picture - with two different cameras and lenses (24-70mm and 70-200mm) from a dozen different angles for half an hour.

That did give us time to talk. I learned that from pest prevention to sun protection, painting tree trunks has long been a traditional technique in orchards and landscapes around the world. Tree trunks are also painted white simply for decoration.

Although he says the practice was more popular up until about the 60s, Dash saw the eye-catching trunks in the South, and even he said, while touring the “Great Gatsby” Gilded Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island.

After a pine tree died shortly after he moved into the house in 1977, he replaced it with the tree in the foreground, digging it up and hauling it from his backyard with a rope attached to his ’67 Ford Falcon.

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: