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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

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