![]() The tree is slowly regaining water sprout branches after the major pruning. ![]() I can embrace your concerns about tree-hacking because I’ve seen it happen next door here too, on an old maple with just the trunk remaining after they removed all the branches. Like you, I’m planting many native, edible, and pollinator plants in our new place in the central Willamette Valley. I write with love, and a broken heart.Īmy, your article about encouraging numerous creatures in nature provides great inspiration. I build rock piles and log piles and leave my garden messy. I clear patches of bare soil for ground-nesting bees, who cannot burrow through thick mulch. I sow sunflowers, phacelia, California poppies. I plant more natives in my garden-willow, chokecherry, serviceberry, madrone, oceanspray, goldenrod, gumweed, sidalcea. Not giving in to despair, I do what I can to give wildlife a fighting chance. In the days and weeks that follow, when I glimpse that tortured tree, I respond with anger and sadness, but also love. They let me know the depth of my feeling and the power of all life struggling for justice and equality.” These emotions are not enemies but indicators of empathy and compassion. “I don’t want to always feel better in my garden,” Vogt writes in A New Garden Ethic. We must remain engaged, Vogt says, and keep fighting for nature, even though at times it breaks our heart to acknowledge what we’ve done to it. One passage in particular keeps coming back to me: “Be willing to love with a broken heart,” he says, “to foster that breaking and touch the world that so many hold at a distance to protect their identity.” Faced with sad stories about habitat destruction on a daily basis, many of us turn away in despair. ![]() It’s a thoughtful, inspiring book about gardening in an era of global warming and mass extinctions. I’ve recently read A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future by Benjamin Vogt. All I know is, I have a knot in my stomach. ![]() I don’t know which is worse-topping a tree and ruining its shape for the rest of its life, or taking it out altogether despite it being perfectly healthy. They’ve topped it, and now they’re leaving. They’re packing up! They’re not taking the tree down after all. What’s taking so long? Let’s just get it over with. I think of the songbirds, in turn, who rely on those caterpillars to feed their chicks and who nest and perch in its branches. More importantly, I think of the countless native bees and other pollinators nourished by its flowers each spring and of the many caterpillar species that feed on its foliage (155 of them in the Portland area, according to the National Wildlife Foundation website). I can see how it’s blocked the view to other backyards, and I realize how it has sheltered my garden from the blustery east winds that rip through our neighborhood. In the seven years I’ve lived next to this old tree, I’ve never given it much thought. Masses of foliage removed, with little left for photosynthesis. Large limbs, cut straight across, leaving gaping wounds. These are the kind of cuts you make to a tree that’s being removed. I haven’t seen her since she bought the place four years ago. Should I say something? What can I do? The men are just doing their job, and the landlord is nowhere to be found. The men are working slowly but steadily, and more and more branches are coming down. I try not to keep checking out the window, but I can’t help myself. The men have removed some of the lower branches and there’s a glimmer of light under the tree. I’m learning about the bees and bugs and wasps and dragonflies that dwell in my garden, and I’m loving it. I’m encouraged by the diversity of insects I’m already starting to see. I’ve been reading about gardening for wildlife, and it’s got me eager to make some changes. I’m renovating my garden this year, replacing most of my purely ornamental plants with more wildlife-friendly options. I go back to working in my garden and try to tune out the sound of falling branches. Each fall, the apple crop is abundant, though the fruits are rather sour. Smaller branches, clothed in fresh green foliage, sprout from the main trunks in profusion. Now, its five sturdy trunks, each spanning 10 inches across, form a vase-shaped canopy that fills nearly half the backyard. I’m guessing it’s been growing there as a free spirit for 60 years or more it was probably planted shortly after the little ranch house was built in 1956. From the looks of it, it has never been pruned. I’ve seen the carnage that untrained tree trimmers can inflict on a tree, and the lack of safety equipment tells me that these gentlemen are not Certified Arborists.Ĭertainly, the old tree could use some pruning. Peeking over the fence, I see two men with saws and pole pruners. It’s mid-May, and I’m working in my garden when I hear voices coming from the direction of my neighbor’s apple tree.
2 Comments
|