Planting Trees

Shortly after Amy and I moved into our first house in Berkeley, my parents came to visit. The duplex was near public transit, had a south facing back yard and three bedrooms, all of which were on my list of criteria. The duplex also met Amy’s criteria, which were Berkeley and affordability. It had only one obvious flaw: someone painted it a garish sulfur yellow.

My mom wasn’t bothered by the yellow, but she didn’t like the front yard, which was a patch of crabgrass with a lone yucca just to the right of the steps into the house. We weren’t going to leave it as it was, were we? Amy and I assured her that we would spruce things up. Next thing I remember, we were off to a garden store. Mom and Dad purchased us a carload full of plants: an assortment of drought-tolerant ground-covers and shrubs largely recommended by the staff. The following day before Amy got home from work, Mom, Dad, and I dug up the crabgrass and put most of the plants into the earth.

Not everything that we planted thrived. One of the ground-covers spread like a weed. Another barely at all. I had buyers remorse about two of the new shrubs: wrong shape and color, and barely stood out from the ground-covers. The yucca remained the eye-catcher with its tall crown of white blossoms. Perhaps what was most memorable from that effort was the effort itself. The four of us collaborated on a project to make our home nicer, the block prettier, and our little plot more diverse.

A landscape architect was the previous owner of our second house, just a couple of blocks from the first. We moved into a veritable orchard of dwarf fruit trees: an apple, peach, nectarine, cherry, apricot, guava. There were also some larger old trees: two different plums and a huge avocado. It was an urban oasis, where we were able to entertain large indoor-outdoor parties. Guests could pick a fruit right off the trees and saunter to our living room to enjoy it.

I brought the “plant fruit trees” mentality with me to our next house. When our four-year-old said Satsuma oranges were her favorite, I found a nursery selling Satsumas. Amy wanted apples. Our gardener found a dwarf four-in-one plant that grew a different variety of apple on each of its main branches. The same gardener picked out a yellow pluot and Shinseki apple pear. I have spent decades explaining these trees to visitors: a pluot is a cross of a plum and an apricot with smooth skin like the plum (whereas an aprium has fuzzy skin like an apricot). An apple pear, also called Asian pear, is its own species, not something that Luther Burbank invented.

When Amy’s father died, we planted a Bartlett pear in his honor. Pears, Amy told us were his favorite fruit. It took us more than ten years to figure out that if you leave Bartletts to ripen on the tree, they turn to mush. We now pick them when they get to a reasonable size and let them ripen indoors. Then we can enjoy pear juice running down our arms when we eat the pears.

I’ve been thinking about trees since a certificate arrived in the mail several weeks after Dad died: My cousins had planted a tree in Dad’s honor in Israel. The certificate sent reminded me those sent to my religious school every Tu Bishvat, when our class would contribute our allowances to buy trees in Israel. עֵץ, etz, the Hebrew word for tree, remains in my ever shrinking Hebrew vocabulary.

A few days after the certificate arrived, Amy and I set out on our road trip from Berkeley to our house in the Catskills. Somewhere in Nebraska, I spotted a herd of Holstein cows, the kind Dad had, in a large field. Then I remembered games of hide and seek with Dad when I was child. Dad often hid behind the oak which served as our base, rather than finding a spot to hide. As soon as I, or whoever was “it,” ran off to find the hiders, Dad would shout “Humphrey,” (then the vice-president), his version of “Home Free,” and infuriately win again. I smiled.

Then I remembered when Mom and Dad planted the tree that served as home base. Mom picked out the spot, only to realize several years later that she should have picked a different spot. Dad gamely dug the dime-sized hole for the nickel-sized plant, working up a sweat on a muggy day.

When a tree didn’t work out as planned, Mom was off to the nursery or garden store as if their staff were plant librarians. Mom was “in her element” when she could pass a whole day weeding, pruning, and mowing the grass. This morning, the NY Times has sent me an e-newsletter titled “Why gardening is so good for you,” which links to an article that Mom could have written herself.  Dad had corn and hay fields to manage so he didn’t bring the same gusto to gardening. He acted as more as gardener sous chef to Mom.

I remembered an acquaintance in Guanajuato, Mexico who introduced me to the concept of “princess gardening.” One walks through the garden snipping here, picking there, admiring in another spot. One waits for the fairies to take care of anything too challenging.  

Princess gardening perfectly describes my Catskills gardening technique. Our house is in a small clearing in a large forest, mainly owned by the City of New York, which maintains a huge reservoir about two miles downhill from us. Small and large are relative terms. Our small clearing in the Catskills is practically the size of our block of 20 houses in Berkeley.¹

Enter Lou and Dave, who I met a couple of years back when they were restoring what looked like a long pile of rocks into a wall. “A farmer’s wall,” Lou described it. No cutting of rock. No mortar. In California, we’d call it a dry wall.

“That’s what I want!” I said enthusiastically. “Can you come by our place and take a look?” We had rock piles galore. In fact, two years into our Catskills home ownership, Amy still described our property as looking like a construction site.

Lou and Dave came by and shortly were hired. They are both “semi-retired,” like Amy and me. Dave was an estate manager for a huge mountaintop property built by a Titan of Industry in Andrew Carnegie’s era. Lou had taught school and coached many sports; his favorite being wrestling. While Amy and I toil in our semi-retirements at our respective computers, Lou and Dave are outside rearranging rock piles, removing dead trees, and now planting new ones.

“I want to plant two trees in honor of my parents,” I told Lou and Dave. I had in mind tricolor beeches. I had fond memories of the one Mom planted near our front door in Spencerport.  Lou recommended a couple of nurseries. I called around. I didn’t want sprigs that would get lost in the forest or munched by the deer down to the ground. I’ve already put in and lost plenty of those last year. I found a nursery that had one tricolor beech and one copper beach. “Perfect,” I said, now believing that the two different plants would complement each other, maybe an improvement on two of the same.

The trees required heavy machinery, which Dave was happy to provide.

Although Dave and Lou did ninety-five percent of the work, I went outside to help level the trees, and mulch and water them. In less than a week, a small brown bird (sparrow?) nested in the tricolor beech. Yesterday, the bird and its mate flew in and out adding twigs to the nest. I’m crossing my fingers that later this summer, we’ll get to see a few chicks. My fingers remain crossed that neither beech will attract too many spongy moths (introduced) or forest tent caterpillars (native), which are in large supply this year.

While the trees do not take away the loss of my parents, their constant companionship reminds me of my parents’ many efforts to nurture and protect me. The trees provide shade, filter the water (you’re welcome New York City!), convert our oversupply of CO2 into O2, buffer the house from strong winds, and attract fauna and other flora. They’ll keep contributing long after I’m gone.

1. According to a 2021 inventory of natural resources of the Olive, our town in the Catskills, nearly 50% of the Town, or 20,456 of its 41,489 acres, has been conserved, primarily in fee by New York State and New York City DEP. https://townofolive.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Olive-NRI-report-FINAL-1-25-21.pdf