Arbitrary Limbs

I chose this apartment to be in trees. It looks onto the city’s oldest park, which extends the illusion of living in a vast forest, with century-old evergreens in the middle distance.

This is the first time I made trees such a priority. Why? I heard someone else make this request once, a fancy and discerning person, very sensitive to space. I am a person very sensitive to space, which I thought was dependent on interior factors. My fancier friend pointed out that an exterior view is crucial to interior experience. I am not immune to a view: seascapes, mountains, a glacial lake. But such obvious desirability of view is reserved for vacation destinations; to expect them daily would engage fantasy, and lead to derangement, or madness. To own such a view would lead to worse, I suspect. However, my fancier friend argued it was not deranged to demand common aspects of the natural world on a daily basis, such as a view of trees. I would not have recognized trees as belonging to my space prior to that discussion.

When it became clear that I was to do this thing—leave my job in the place where my home is to work for periods of time in another city very far away—the advice I was given by a psychiatrist was not to create a situation of deficit in the new location. To be clear, the first location is my ‘home,’ the other is an intermittent residence. It is a rental. Constant evidence of the lack in this intermittent residence would intensify my feelings of banishment from my home, even though I had banished myself, a self-banishment. There was the lack of my partner, most of the time, and my dog, some of the time, and my home, all of the time. Replication of a ‘luxury’ feature from my home could offset other forms of lack, like autonomy of ownership, or access to my garden. My real home is not beset with luxury features, but it has a specificity of space curated by myself and partner, and quite a lot of trees for its small urban allotment. I was to work in a city of parks, so I used its civic luxury to my advantage: to be at the level of the trees, to look into and through trees.

My real home has several windows in the trees. I rarely look out those windows. I suppose it is enough to know they are there. I spend most of my time in a room that looks onto the driveway, and the neighboring triple-decker rental property. This view features a collapsed fence, propped against the concrete retaining wall it should be built on top of. Anytime a board falls off, a bittersweet vine quickly fills in the gap. Bittersweet is not a tree; it is an invasive vine. There are also such things as invasive trees, but few trees are as invasive as bittersweet, which attacks on all fronts. Trying to contain the driveway bittersweet would be counterproductive: it has become a structural element keeping the fence upright. In other parts of the garden, I wage war against bittersweet, most ardently where it threatens to overtake a cherry tree flourishing in view of my windows.

Bittersweet is a regional plague. Every region has something similar attacking the trees. When my partner and I stay with friends in Wales, we are often enlisted in a battle against the brambles invading the thicket they planted overlooking the sea. Those are European trees, not part of my arboreal imaginary, so I use the word thicket, a literary word. The brambles in Wales adore the sea air and are insatiable in their spread. An attack on brambles begins with the sharpening of the machetes, whose edges are dulled quickly in the onslaught, so it is useful to have someone positioned at the grinder, continuously sharpening, a job I enjoy. However, on our last visit, even the sharpener had been worn down by the brambles.

Bittersweet has already overtaken half the garden at my real home, and covered over the Rose of Sharon, which I fear is not long for this world. Many would call Rose of Sharon invasive, but with aggressive strategic pruning, it can be forced into a vertical shape with tree-like trunks. It is a relative of the hibiscus. Its shoots tunnel below the earth and arise like separate plants, but I know them to be offspring, and attack them as such. I was told once by a neighbor that to do anything less could jeopardize the life of the parent. This was at a previous residence where I lived with another partner. The neighbor didn’t put it that way of course; I’m putting it that way for effect. The neighbor just said: Those are suckers and if you don’t cut them back, the tree will die.

He didn’t realize that Rose of Sharon is not a tree. I did, but did not mention it at the time. Now, I fight to protect the Rose of Sharon from bittersweet, not because it particularly appeals to me, but because of this previous go-around with a Rose of Sharon, where I was not a good guardian.

My former neighbor was very proud of his gardening prowess and liked to offer unsolicited advice. He found my garden unruly. I didn’t call what I had a garden. I called it a yard. Calling a yard a garden is an affectation I adopted later, to indicate investment in cultivation beyond grass. At that house, the unruly yard/garden was not even at risk for grass, due to overhang from six Norway Maples on the property behind us. A friend pointed this out to me in my first year:

Norway Maples are the worst, she said. Nothing will grow beneath them. The only thing you can do is have them taken out.

But they aren’t even on our property, I said.

It doesn’t matter, she said. They aren’t intentional: they’ve grown up between that shed and the fence.

She was right. The shed—whose windows revealed it was stuffed with unrecycled aluminum cans—hid the maples from view of the main house. They likely went unseen until they were too costly to remove.

Phone up the city. They’ll make them cut those back at least, so they aren’t encroaching on your space. And then you can have a garden.

I did not follow her advice. I was sympathetic to the type of people who, feeling so unsure of how to deal with a recyclable product, rather than dispose of it in a landfill, would just let it pile up in their shed, from paralysis or from shame, until it was overtaken by rogue maples.

I was quite young at that time. My former neighbor noted it was ‘my first house’ or he probably would have reported me to the city, just as my friend had suggested I do with the neighbors behind us. I now see that to report the neighbors is a self-protective strike. His offering of advice and tools and the names of reputable lawn services took a gentle, but increasingly urgent tone, so I persuaded my partner to enlist one of the recommended services. They came bi-weekly for mowing, edging, and spraying weeds with Roundup. This lawn service also took up the task of butchering the Rose of Sharon in such a way that ensured its ultimate demise.

I don’t fault my former neighbor for his invasive approach: I know he thought I was bringing down the flavor of the street. Our street was only the length of one block, branching at the top, and ceding autonomy to longer streets, justified in their reputations and monikers. When we gave people our address, most found it hard to find, or even, imagine where we lived, having never had reason to be on a street of such stunted range. Of the few houses, my former neighbor owned two: one to the left of us, his home, and one to the right, his therapy practice. In this regard, he had an elevated stake, personally and professionally, in the look of the street.

Our derelict bungalow was sandwiched between his two elegantly expressive bungalows. Our moving truck accidentally broke a limb of a tree in the bump-out beyond the curb on our first day, so our first experience as homeowners was this neighbor yelling at the truck driver about the damaged limb, adding: I planted all the trees on this street!

And he had. A decade prior, when the bump-outs were installed to deter speeding, the neighbor had planted several identical ornamental pear trees, giving the street a sense of uniformity and purpose. Bradford pears, to be precise. Traditional pear trees have the undesirable aspect of branching at the ground, leading to all sorts of problems. A horticultural innovation made it possible for a traditional pear tree to be grafted onto a straighter trunk species to create an upright, tidy pyramidal shape. Grafted, and thus self-contained, they were widely planted in parking lots, road medians, civic spaces; they were thought to be sterile, and thus considered lacking in threat. Later decades revealed they were not at all sterile, but quite virile, with seeds easily spread great distances by birds. Without grafting, the rogue offspring of Bradford pears cease to be tidy and upright, and revert to baser instincts. They are no longer recommended for homeowners but are still prevalent. I suppose the results of their virility is out of view of most homeowners, so without watching informational videos, few know of their reclassification to invasive status.

I grew up in a home with both traditional pear trees and ornamental pear trees, so I can spot them quite easily. I did not mention their invasive status to my former neighbor at the time, as we were already at a deficit in his eyes.

During my residence in this ‘first house,’ I preferred to play dumb regarding the garden. I did not tell my former neighbor that I had grown up with a father who was renowned for his gardens, to the degree that he was thought eccentric, or deranged. Not because the gardens were terribly deranged, though they were unusual for a rural Midwestern town, but because the degree to which he gardened stretched polite norms. My father had a passion for trees in particular, and planted thickly on the property, slightly less than an acre of truly undesirable land on the edge of a municipal airport, a trucking company, and a trash incinerator. He planted trees that most people did not have in their gardens for practical reasons—size, spread, excessive detritus from fruit fall, nut fall, leaf fall, etc. His trees were high-maintenance trees, requiring constant attention.

My father was no longer good at walking, and no longer worked a regular job for this reason, and so he was able to devote himself to his trees. To see him staggering about with his deranged gait, tending his eccentric trees, was hard to ignore for those driving past the property on their way to the incinerator, municipal airport, or trucking company. Many also wondered about the sheer expense. My father was famously frugal, to the point of being what some might call ‘tight,’ and we lived in a small town where everyone knew each other’s financial circumstances. He appeared to spend quite a lot on his trees. However, he always had schemes to get good prices, through exchanges with other gardeners, or, by cultivating friendships with local nursery owners. My father could be very charming—tall, attractive, taciturn but folksy, and with his deranged gait, he was capable of getting things from people for little or nothing on his end. Thus, the small forest of our yard grew rapidly, luxuriously. Ultimately, my father’s goal was to be left alone in his forest, and having planted the property to within an inch of its life, he simply tended it until he could no longer walk at all, and to be fair, well beyond that.

People were not invited into the forest. If they made it in, it meant that in traveling to the incinerator, municipal airport, or trucking company, they were so taken aback by the yard that they pulled over and requested a tour. I could never tell if this was something that pleased him, or his worst nightmare. He was prideful about his small forest, so he may not have minded. The minute an outsider appeared, he would go into his public mode of charm and ease, so that it was impossible to tell what, if anything, he felt.

My father was partial to weeping trees. I suspect this was for sentimental reasons, being a melancholy personality when not working an angle. Weeping willows and weeping evergreens were in abundance. As with Norway Maples, nothing grew beneath them. They hang to the ground, and their leaf and needle shed is impossible to contain. With willows, the stringy branches get snarled in a lawn mower’s blades and burn out the engine.

This is not the case for all weeping trees. Many are grafted onto a straight, tidy base that can be easily mown around. Weeping cherry trees are often described as ornamental, in the same way Bradford pears are. They do not fruit. Ornamental might refer to a kind of excess of decorative features, such as blossoms, which transcend use value. Truly all fruit trees have an abundance of blossoms in spring, followed hotly by fruit. Ornamental might then indicate a deficit of use value, in which fruiting is considered ‘of use.’ In modern scenarios of home ownership, fruit is rarely harvested; instead it falls to the ground to rot. This makes little difference to the tree in question, in terms of reproductive cycle. Considered thus, an ornamental tree is that which has been stripped of its own agenda.

Do not trust these grafted weepers, for they, like the Bradford pear, tend to revert to a baser form, and suddenly sprout upright, arbitrary limbs, ruining the aesthetic effect, giving the tree the look of a mad scientist. My father had several of these weepers as well, and, in his desperation to maintain the uniformity of their sorrow, he forcibly trained their branches until the will of their upright ancestor was broken. As often as I saw my father in bucolic symbiosis with his trees, more often he was on attack, or seeking submission. He always wore a gun belt with holstered sheers. He also kept a wide array of saws, machetes, and axes. He was particularly fond of a small chainsaw versatile enough to be used while in the tree, something that is recommended by no one. Most of his battles were fought for containment of the trees themselves, containing them against themselves, against their own agendas. My father had so many trees that he managed with maximum effort throughout his life, that after his death the yard rewilded viciously, so that my brother, now annexing the home, has been fined repeatedly by the city.

My father was also well versed in toxins, and in the precise application of weed killers for a targeted death strike. When I found bittersweet at the base of the Bradford pear at my former residence, he told me how to deal with it: cut back all growth to the base; then, using a power drill with a large bit, drill a receptacle deep into the base. Finally, fill a syringe with Roundup and inject it directly into the hole in the base.

Being hippy-ish, I wanted no traffic with Roundup, a cocktail of seven or eight known carcinogens. Not for a tree I did not plant, in a bump-out that I did not technically own, no way. I actually think bittersweet is rather pretty in the fall, when the leaves fall away, and it puts on a kind of berry that imitates a red and yellow blossom.

It seems rather arbitrary, if you ask me, I said, to ordain death to one invasive thing and not the other.

My father shrugged me off. He often found my idealism, if not self-righteous, certainly performatively obtuse. To him, to be involved in horticulture was to be involved in death. Cultivation was assassination. If my stakes in my garden were serious, I must brace for violence. Though he did not say it. He was not a big talker. He said only: Wear gloves.

Frankly, I hate Bradford pears, I said. To me they are the symbol of commercial sprawl and suburban conformity. They are the horticultural equivalent of a Starbucks.

I said it at the time, because, in those days, even though I had a reputation for an easy-going demeanor, it required refraining from speaking my mind. If left alone with only a tree or a father as witness, my tendency was to be unvarnished in my discourse.

Then don’t do it, he said, and see what happens to the tree.

I did do it, wearing gloves, as instructed. And, I did it two more times, because even with that extreme targeted attack, with a high-kill substance, the bittersweet returned thrice, and in fact was snaking its way up the Bradford’s grafted trunk a fourth time when I vacated the premises two years later, leaving its fate in the hands of my soon-to-be ex-partner, or, more likely, to the neighbor who planted it.

By then my father had already died of cancer, and while it is tempting to draw a line between his cancer and his embrace of chemical death, I doubt anything is ever so straightforward. His life was filled with carcinogens, for example DEET, which was sprayed to deter mosquitos in those days. And his tiny forest, adjacent to a trash incinerator, was also a few miles from a Superfund site, a ruin from mining and extraction. He had grown up and lived his entire life in a landscape of carcinogens and strife. He was resigned to being surrounded by agents of death. It is a wonder he ever planted a tree at all.

After that, I moved to a less desirable neighborhood across town on a street where the Hell’s Angels have a clubhouse. Here, I thought, no neighbor will force me to garden. There are also bump-outs in that neighborhood, but until recently no one had shown the initiative to plant trees in them. As a result, about once a week, someone would hit a bump-out at speed and blow out a tire. One time, I saw a car flip completely.

More recently, I planted a tree in the bump-out most notorious for flat tires. I got the tree from the clearance section of a big-box store for $5. It was totally fried to a crisp, a throwaway tree. If someone flipped a car onto it, nothing much would be lost. I watered it with a bucket at midnight for a week. It felt invasive. I remembered my former neighbor and his Bradford pears and decided to leave it to its fate. Weirdly, it survived. The big-box store had labeled it ‘weeping cherry,’ but of course, it has its own agenda.

When I left that first house-partner-tree, it was unexpected. It made little sense to our friends, one of whom told me at the time: I find it hard to accept this, since you never discussed it with me. This was the same friend who had explained my Norway Maple problem to me. To be fair, like my father, I have been guilty of keeping my more melancholy feelings to myself. And, I have had some confusions about what is interior and what is exterior in relation to questions of ownership, as I mentioned. It had not occurred to me that people close to me might feel they had a right to a view, as if through a window, of my interior state. Later, the same friend said to a few people: She went mad over the death of her father. Perhaps she was right. At the time, I would not have seen the forest for the, etc.

Ultimately, I am unconvinced by this accusation of madness. It is the type of thing people like to say when someone diverges from a path that looks desirable. Such decisions are aberrant, arbitrary. I thought this last word might share a root with tree, in Latin arbor, arbre in French, árbol in Spanish, etc. But it does not. The root is arbiter (to judge), so my association is forced. In this case, perhaps arbitrary acts are those judged for oneself, for one’s own agenda, nothing to do with a tree. Though such things can look quite unruly to the untrained eye. For instance, years later when I made this decision to banish myself from my home to work inside my tree house, another friend said: You have gone mad. However, by that time there was no father or tree to pin it on.