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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: Homestead <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] On planting trees
  • Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 07:26:49 -0700

In the thirty years I have been stewarding the place I call Heartwood I have planted many trees. Some were planted with the hope for food, the peaches, pears and apples. Some went into the ground for sublime beauty, the sweet gum straight out from the kitchen sink window. During its fall color time it is hard to keep one's eyes on the kitchen task for its majestic color performance. Some were planted for nostalgia, the four maples trees brought down from Bracebridge, Ontario, to memorialize our son, wife and two sons. The sprouts made the trip in plastic drink cups, were only a few inches tall then now fulfill fifteen feet of memory. The two heartnut trees straight out from the house toward the stream were gifts from friends. The two English walnuts are growing too slowly for my purpose, to provide easily cracked nuts, a labor and taste counter to the ubiquitous black walnuts planted each fall by squirrels and mown each spring by the temporary landlord. Early on, during the spring mow-back, I left about a dozen of them to show the erratic squirrel trail from the big momma tree next to the house on up to the woods. They have been pruned too little; Tvo would no doubt chastise me for failing to follow his sound advice, but then I knew him for too short a time, and our friendship began well after the saved trees were bending and branching beyond a furniture future.

The peaches proved problematical. When blossoms survived late frost the fruit formed but inevitably suffered brown rot. One year I was determined to eat homegrown peaches. During the winter I pruned a tree to a box shape about eight feet tall. Once the spring sun began its rollercoaster ride I put a sheet of clear plastic over the top two-thirds of the tree and secured the corners with twine down to stakes. When anyone at all predicted a frost I put out a bucket of glowing oak embers insulated with ash. In a couple weeks, while its nearby neighbors still stood stark naked, the coddled tree was luxuriant with new leaves. It set fruit. The fruit grew. And every half-size peach succumbed to brown rot.

So it is with trees. Some prosper, some fail. Whether for the taste of fresh peach or the common quest for beauty, we push climate zone imperatives. The sensible thing would be to focus on what grows naturally and easily on one's place. But who will settle for a few simple servings when a cornucopia is contemplated?

Here is what brought me to these musings this morning:

The Rural Life
Sudden Growth

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: June 5, 2007

Seven years ago, I planted a pair of white spruces — Picea glauca. They came by mail in slender tubes from a nursery in Oregon, mere wisps of vegetation. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to put them, so I stuck them in an improvised nursery bed, beside the sweet corn and the pole beans. A year later I moved them just inside the fence along the gravel road that runs past our place. It has been to their liking. Those trees are now well over 10 feet tall — lone emissaries from the great forest of white spruces that reaches across Canada.

There is always an assumption of selflessness in planting a tree. You’re supposed to think, while digging the hole, how far into the future the tree will grow and what shallow, unconvincing weeds we humans are in comparison.

It’s true that I’d like to see these spruces in another 80 years. But I can take in the whole tree now. I can watch the growing tip — so wan in early June — gradually turn into trunk. I can still remember that I planted these spruces myself. When they are fully mature, they will seem to have planted themselves.

The rest of the garden grows much faster. The peas and beans shoot up and so will the tomatoes and corn. But every year the vegetables get to be just so tall, just so ripe, and then down they come with the harvest, the frost. I know their limits as well as they do. I am not going to be staggered by a patch of corn that turns out to be 30 feet tall. The garden will tell me soon enough where the summer went.

But I’m staggered by these spruces nearly every day.

They are growing in full view of my office window so it should not be possible for them to sneak up on me. And yet every year they do. I began asking, “How did they get so tall?,” when they were only waist- high. I’m still asking now that they’re beginning to dwarf me. I’d like to say that slow has turned sudden in these spruces, because we imagine a stoicism in the way trees grow. But I’ve been a close witness of their vegetative life, and in my mind I cannot keep up with it. VERLYN KLINKENBORG


  • [Homestead] On planting trees, Gene GeRue, 06/05/2007

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