It is, of course, Valentine's Day, and in searching the natural world for suitable, and safe-for-work viewing, examples of Lupercalia, I knew I was going to be hard-pressed to locate much. It's a little too early for the animal mating season, and though a few birds have, as noted earlier, begun to pair, most critters are too busy trying to stay warm than to think about, well, another kind of warmth. However, the not-quite-green segment of the natural world came to my rescue when I spotted these two trees—they appear to be an oak and a birch—coming together in a way that exemplifies, to me, anyway, a species of transcendent harmony. Botanists even have a word for this: inosculation. It's a kind of grafting behavior, and you see it most often when branches of the same tree come together and, over time, fuse. It also occurs among neighboring trees, and, once conjoined, these are referred to by foresters as gemels, which is Latin for pair. They're also called "husband and wife" trees—a perfect symbol for the 14th.