Most Wednesday mornings I drive to TreePeople, a beautiful park in the Santa Monica Mountains. I have been identifying and mapping their trees and shrubs. On each visit, I look forward to the fresh air, healthy walks, more tree and shrub discoveries, and to discussing my ideas with my friend, the arborist.

The maps I have of the park are not drawn to scale. So it has been difficult trying to plot the locations of shrubs and trees. A few weeks ago, I had a good idea. I paced off the distances between the many markers at the park, such as buildings, fences, benches, light poles, cisterns (large circular areas where rain water is collected), driveways, pathways. The problem was, even with the pacing measures, I could not plot them on maps, which were not drawn to scale.

This week I had an even better idea. Why not cut out circles and other shapes to scale, based on my pacing measurements. That is just what I did at home this week. I couldn’t find my old protractor, so I used the 3-inch-diameter top of a plumber’s putty jar to draw my first circle. That circle represented the largest cistern, which was 15 paces in diameter. All subsequent cutouts and plotting were based on that first circle. When I wanted to know the distance in inches from, say, one circle to the next, that was 10 paces away, I used the formula: 3 inches/15 paces = X inches/10 paces. Solving for X yields an answer of 2 inches.

I had fun cutting out circles for cisterns, rectangles for buildings, smaller green circles for certain trees. Then I taped my cutout shapes to a large piece of paper using double-stick tape. I was able to move the shapes around to get the right distances in different directions from different objects. However, even with this procedure, it was sometimes difficult to know exactly where a new shape was to be placed in reference to two other shapes. I discovered that if I cut out thin rectangles equal to the distances between shapes, I could manipulate those rectangles such that their placement would determine the location for that new shape.

Later I will photograph my new charts and clean them up with my Adobe editing program. It should be fairly easy to plot the locations of trees and shrubs.

When I am manipulating cutouts, whether it is for pop-up cards or TreePeople maps, I am creating an on-paper world the way I want it to be. That is fun.

Mr. Ebsen may be contacted at robertebsen@hotmail.com