Where I saw loss, a smoketree saw opportunity.

The American smoketree is on fire today, lighting up the canopy of one of our emerging mini-woodlands. Half of a two-trunk tulip poplar lies in the shadows, embracing life from a low angle and still attached to her upright twin.

Earlier this year, I worried about the smoketree, as taller volunteers nearby began to commandeer most of her sunlight. The thought of losing the matriarch of this little wildlife oasis left me wistful and conflicted. A small species with a big presence, she comes in colors everywhere, like a rainbow, as the Rolling Stones would say: from the purple-ish spent flower clusters and lime-green leaves of summer to the blazing orange arms of autumn. The tree has been an anchor, for me and for the deer, raccoons and foxes who wander underneath her to spend time in the growing patches of winterberry, ferns, sea oats, sassafras and wildflowers that gather around.

Our habitat is always evolving, so I resigned myself to the idea that perhaps the smoketree had had her day, and that maybe new things were in store that I couldn’t possibly predict. I was correct on the second count. During a mid-summer storm, the tulip poplars nearby faced off with strong winds, and half of one gave way. The skies above opened up in the wake of the fall, and a lovely clearweed patch and other shade-loving plants in the understory tried to hide their faces from the glare. Suddenly I went from worrying about too little sun in this area to too much. But the smoketree rejoiced, adding girth again to her waning shape, rounding back out where she had started to appear almost columnar.

I don’t plan to remove the fallen tulip poplar any time soon; she’s soaking up the low-hanging sunlight of these cooler days and wearing all the yellows and browns of her sister. She has more life left in her yet, and when her time arrives, she won’t really leave us, nourishing even more beings among her decaying branches and bark for years to come. Things fall apart, and they come back together again, in new ways, with new colors and shapes and textures we can never anticipate.

Postscript: American smoketree (Cotinus obovatus), shown above in mid-October 2015,  is native two states west of me in Kentucky. Its range also includes Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma. Though I plant locally native plants as much as possible, I purchased the smoketree about 15 years ago at a native plant sale in Washington, D.C., not realizing its range didn’t include Maryland. I don’t feel compelled to remove her, though. If we didn’t have so many invasives to contend with, if we didn’t have to worry about climate change affecting the ranges of our plants, if all my remaining turfgrass had already been replaced by natives, and if I had a million dollars to hire help, then maybe I’d have a landscape completely filled with plants native to my county. I aspire to that ideal, but until all those aforementioned “ifs” are satisfied, the smoketree, the red buckeye, the echinacea, and the other almost-natives get to stay.