As my family helps my mom back onto solid ground, the sumacs, sassafras and wildflowers are forming the same kind of protective circle around our old tree.
A cable is wrapped around the soft bone in my mom’s newly reconstructed hip, holding together what remains. Following two falls on steep steps, her skeleton was “crushing in on itself,” the surgeon told us, with shards of cartilage floating around in her joint fluid. “She must have been in extreme pain,” he added, though my stoic mother later disputed that description.
There’s a cable wrapped around the branches of the tallest tree in my backyard, too, placed there lovingly a few years ago by a kind arborist who couldn’t bear the thought of removing such a beautiful living being before her time. He spent hours observing her from many angles, peering up close into the branches and checking her out from a good distance away in the back meadow. In the end he provided two estimates: one for adding more reinforcing cables that would give her extra stability in the short-term and one for cutting her to the ground and making her into wood chips. The latter option would be drastic for the life around the tree, he warned, gesturing toward the nearby shade and meadow gardens. “These plants will go into shock with all that sudden light.”
My husband and I chose to let the tree decide for herself when and how she wants to go. Though a large fracture splits her trunk almost in two, she’s still standing, still leafing out at the top and reaching her arms toward the sky. She’s been dropping limbs for years, shedding her burdens whenever the wind blows too hard, and letting in more light below. Each summer among the ostrich ferns, maiden ferns, golden ragworts and black cohosh at her base, new plants gather to greet her—black raspberries, pokeweed, Virginia creeper, spicebush, fleabanes, shallow sedges, and nimblewill. In the surrounding gardens, the wildflowers and saplings, long situated at the edge of sun and shade, are bursting forth from the receding shadows.
I’ve spent years preparing for sad endings and new beginnings in my habitat. Though visiting botanists and arborists have been unable to figure out her exact identity, everyone agrees that the distinguished matriarch towering over all our other plants is some kind of ash, and therefore doomed to a life cut short when the emerald ash borers inevitably find her. Yet our sweet tree hangs on, still sheltering her friends and neighbors from harsh sun while also letting in more rays. She’s finding the balance between guarding her loved ones and letting them go and grow, branching out and reseeding on their own and in new directions.
***
At one time, she was the only tree left standing in the vast expanse of lawn cultivated by the previous owners of our home. Not long after we moved in, a nearby sister tree toppled during a thunderstorm. Even when they’d stood tall together, it must have been a lonely existence for them both, plunked down as hopeful saplings into the lawn and then spending most of their lives watching giant riding mowers crush the land around them week after week for years. Scientists have discovered that trees share resources not just with others of their own kinds but also with entirely different species. What would it be like to have gifts to give and no one to give them to?
Sensing that one day our beloved tree would grow tired and weak, and wanting to give her some companionship in her remaining days, about a dozen years ago I began adding plants at the edge of the shade cast by her canopy. It started with three woodland sunflowers, planted in holes dug directly in the turf. Soon those spread but seemed a bit lonely, too, so I smothered a patch of grass with newspaper and leaves to make way for more plants, and I added a spicebush nearby. Then came a bayberry, golden ragwort, wild ginger, and more wildflowers. On the other side of the tree, where I used to have a catmint-lined path to a rose-covered trellis, sassafras began spreading into the garden and the nearby turf, so I let them flourish while I gradually dug out the remaining grasses by hand and replaced them with native groundcovers. The old trellis is falling down now and covered in wild grapevine, with heirloom roses still peeking out beneath.
In anticipation of the tree’s decline, I’ve celebrated and nurtured each new plant sprouting nearby — the tulip poplars and sweetgums, redbuds and maples, oaks and walnuts and hickories and staghorn sumacs. They have started to form a large circle around the old lady, protecting her from winds and casting new shade in new places. In the space where her canopy continues to shrink, the meadow garden is expanding, a sunny clearing in the middle of the developing woodland at the perimeters. The wildflowers and grasses there were fine in part-sun, blooming and spreading slowly each year. But this season, as increased sunlight combines with voluminous rains, the riotous patch has taken on a life of its own, filled with Joe Pye and swamp sunflower and ironweed and golden alexanders and mountain mint reseeding and sprouting anew among the golden ragworts hugging the ground below. The serviceberries and sweetbay magnolia that once struggled along for more light have shot up and out, coming into the world with more energy. Some plants compete, some collaborate, and all are thriving, separately from the plans I once had for them and far more beautifully than I could have anticipated.
***
People often want exact prescriptions for creating a wildlife garden. But there’s no set recipe for nurturing life, no one-size-fits-all guidebook for raising a child or caring for a parent or planting a tree. There are universal ingredients, starting, of course, with love. The more you actively love a person or a tree or a frog or a slug or anyone who relies on you to help them survive and thrive, the easier it is to add the other ingredients to your mixture — the ability to observe, listen, ask questions, and respond to the individual: What do you need from me? What don’t you need? What signs of stress should I be looking for, and what signs of life and joy should I celebrate and let come into their own? What old assumptions do I carry with me that are no longer serving anyone or were never true in the first place?
The cables won’t last forever in my mom’s body or the tree’s. But though we have more in common with trees than we think, there is one key trait that separates us: Once a person falls, she can often get back up again, whether on her own or with the help of friends or family or medical professionals. To help my mom on her feet, we have walkers, a cane, a wheelchair, a rental lift chair, and most of all, my devoted dad. Just a few days after surgery, she’ll be stronger than she was before. And the twinkle in her eye is already back, along with the relentless tall tales about my teenage hellion days.
For a tree, falling and getting back up again isn’t an option. Dying trees know this, and researchers have found that they can pass nutrients through underground fungal networks to surrounding trees throughout the forest, leaving a priceless legacy for the next generations. Even after the fall, though, the tree still gives life — to the beetles and carpenter ants who come to live in the stump, the wood-nesting bees who lay their eggs in the fallen trunk, the woodpeckers who raise their young in the standing snag and make holes that bluebirds and tufted titmice and many other animals will later use.
Soon my mom will be well enough to come over for a visit. We’ll admire the tree, and I’ll make a bouquet from the flowers below for her. She’ll bring me a fruit salad or some “goodies,” as she calls sweet treats, along with little treasures she’s held onto for decades but no longer needs. I will add them to my collection of things, letting them nourish and inspire me until I no longer need them either. But I will always carry inside the other gifts she’s given, trying to actively harbor the patience to grow slowly among shifting shafts of sun and shadows, sharing my own resources, taking only what I need, and looking always for that little bit of light.
RELATED STORY: What Can We Learn from Trees?
Nancy,
This was a beautiful post. I hope your mother continues to heal quickly and that you will have many years ahead to share your garden with her. Thank you for your wise and eloquent thoughts celebrating all the life around us, even amongst the shadows.
Beautiful reply!
Thank you so much, Anne. <3
Gorgeous.
Hi Kim, thank you. <3
Thank you once again for your inspiring posts. This one really touched my heart and reminded me how happy I was to meet you two years ago and call you a friend.
Hi Sharon, I was lucky the day you got in touch with me, too. You bring so much light and kindness and thoughtfulness to the world. Thank you. <3
Such a beautiful, endearing piece. You certainly have a gift for writing. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Jean, thank you! <3
That was a lovely and inspiring post. Thank you!
It’s too long. Beautifully, told of course.
Thanks so much, Barb. <3
A beautiful piece of writing. Lovely arc and tied it all together. I wish you would send it out so it can be read by more than your blog readers.
Hi Jane – thank you! <3 Maybe some time I will. Thanks to the wonders of social media it has at least a little bit of a reach beyond the blog.
Lovely writing. I love the jungle I have created in my garden and so enjoyed your writing about loving your plants. As I read this I am hearing chain saws buzzing somewhere in the neighborhood. Best wishes for your mother’s healing.
Thanks so much, Carolynn, both for your kind thoughts and for nurturing your own garden jungle. It makes up at least a little bit for the chainsaws and makes a difference to all the creatures who call it home. <3
Lovely story.
I’ve spent 20 years turning my 0.2-acre patch of turfgrass into a wonderland of native trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants. Part of it includes an old, big tree (alas, a Norway maple) with cables holding its spreading branches from splitting.
I’m planning to sell my property and move to be closer to family. I hope and pray that there are others like us who might appreciate this patch of wild, and it all won’t be mowed down and covered with dyed mulch when I leave.
Thanks, Mary. Maybe you will find just the right buyer who appreciates your beautiful habitat. I hope so! <3
Nancy, what an absolutely endearing love letter to both your mother and the grand old dowager tree in your back yard! I love how you use the pronoun “she” when describing her (the tree); it really helps convey the close relationship you have with her. Thank you for this lovely essay that I hope opens minds and hearts to see with new appreciation what’s in their own back yards.
Dave Bernazani
Ashburn, VA
P. S. I was hoping to see you speak a while back out here in Leesburg, but before I could get a ticket they said the talk was sold out! I hope you can make it out this way again some time.
Hi Dave, thanks so much. <3 Too bad about Leesburg - it would have been great to meet you! But I do get down to Virginia quite a bit for events; it's very active there.
Oh Nancy…this is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes. Sharing with kindred spirits.
Thanks so much, JT. <3
Nancy…thank you for this heartfelt reminder of the circle of life as embodied in old trees and humans (including us). I read this while sitting (under my blooming American wisteria) on a rickety wooden folding chair that I place wherever I wish to linger in my garden and observe the ferns unrolling and Jack-in-the-pulpits opening, the bees browsing the clover I asked my teenage mower to spare, the cup-plants and Joe-Pye weed reaching for the sun. The lichen-covered dead branches shed by our dying silver maple are cherished by me and carefully added to a woodland border path under two beloved hawthorns that are green now and will be heavily dusted with a mantle of orange cedar-rust spores by mid-July. I won’t spray them with fungicide, as advised by the arborists, to spare the wrens, robins, cardinals and other creatures that shelter there. Nor will I “remove them and plant something else,” as I love their chapel of interwoven arched branches above my plantings of wild ginger, May apples, purple violets, and ramps in their dappled shade.
I live and garden in Wilmette (north suburban Chicago) where many of my neighbors and our village spray to kill mosquitoes (I have seen very few pollinators this spring but perhaps also partly due to cloudy rainy weather). Just sitting here writing this in the morning sunshine I see two fat bumblebees and some tiny native bees, one wasp, hear many birds, and my little dog and I are happy in spite of the commercial mowers, airplanes above and distant highway noise. In my experience gardens are impermanent (like everything else) which is all the more reason to make and share them now as the sanctuaries they are in a roiling universe of change.
Another excellent writer in our midst! Lovely response, Martha. Why is it an endless struggle to accept impermanence and our roiling universe of change? I envy your equanimity. Heading to a weekend meditation retreat in a few hours, hoping to find some peace of my own. Thank you.
HI Martha! I feel like I’m there with you as you describe the life around you – thank you for that. And also for leaving your hawthorns. One of our neighbors just took out some Eastern red cedars because of the rust – they didn’t want it getting on their serviceberries – but I’m leaving mine. Why not? Things will sort themselves out and provide all kinds of habitat no matter what’s growing on them.
As I read with a mixture of tears and empathy, my heart goes out to you. My beloved 75-year-old tree finally lost the battle, and my beloved human companion fights on with the help of caring doctors and modern medicine. I have copied and saved your words, which express my own thoughts and feelings far more eloquently than I could. So many of my friends and colleagues share devotion to both animal welfare and the joys and comfort of their gardens. These are also the people who can and do provide support and understanding on a far deeper level then one normally experiences. My garden has adjusted within a year to the loss of expansive shade…a viburnum experienced a huge growth spurt to shade the hostas and other shade plants that scorched that first year. I am searching deep within myself for the resilience and acceptance I know I must find. Th ere is comfort in your words. I thank you so much. Much love and strength to you, your courageous and spunky Mom and to the beautiful tree you love.
Hi Joan, I’m so sorry to read about the struggles you and your companion have faced and the loss of your tree. It must be a relief to see the life bouncing back in her wake. I am glad these words bring at least some small comfort to you. Thank you for your kindness to me and my mama.<3
” I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.”
– Henry David Thoreau
In recent years I took a similar journey with my mother and having a tree removed in my tiny backyard habitat because of major branch breaking off. When my mother passed, there was a tremendous hole that is now filled with memories; my sunny yard has healed and lush with pollinator plants. Thank you for this very inspirational writing. – Linda
Hi Linda, that’s beautiful. You must miss your mom so much, but it sounds like there is also a lot of solace among the plants and bees and butterflies in your garden. The way you describe this reminds me of the literal hole my dog left behind some ferns, where she used to sleep and stay cool in the summer while I gardened. After she died a little groundhog moved in for the winter and made a burrow there. So sweet. Life continues.
Hi Nancy! Beautiful as always- especially the comparison between your mom and the tree. Yes, we have to make questions to ourselves: do we have to keep up with the Jones’? Or should we rather let our gardens be left at peace? Is the garden a space to show off? Or is it a place we should protect and contemplate?
Hi Soledad! Yes, and it’s so easy – and more rewarding in every way, including spiritually – for it to be both beautiful and nurtured for all the other creatures. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t see a purely ornamental space as pretty at all; it just looks like loss to me.
It is a beautiful post with a wonderful sense of the community built around the matriarch of your yard-some of your placing, some self-invited, but all welcomed . Tree time works on a different clock than the smaller things surrounding and this makes the decline and passing of a loved tree so physical an experience, but there’s such celebration in what you see and write, despite the time stamp EAB brings.
This spring I’ve witnessed more death in our garden for whatever reason, but as you say so eloquently death’s legacy brings life to this community and there’s much peace to be found in that.
Wishing a speedy recovery to your mother-
Eric
Hi Eric – thanks so much. It’s so true – trees are more on our time scale. I’ve just been amazed this season by who gathers around her – how many different species mingling there, where once it was all that lawn. Maybe at some point you and Meg and Will and I will see each other’s gardens. <3
Thank you Nancy, for a beautiful post! Well done!
Thanks, Jane!
Beautifully expressed Nancy, and reminds me how a garden is a dynamic community and not simply a collection of specimens as they are sometimes viewed. I wish more people felt such tenderness that crosses conventional boundaries between nature and ourselves, and as we dwell in both shade and light. I hope your mother continues to feel better and is strong enough to visit soon,
Hi Carol, thanks so much!