The Little Tree That Could
Once, long ago, I was given a gift of trees by an old friend, a woman who remains a friend to this day. She’d received a free packet of trees from a mail-order club for tree freaks. Mail order was what we used to do before we did the internet; some of you may remember that.
They were a spindly lot, a packet of blue spruce trees packed in wet saw dust and stuffed inside a dirty plastic bag. I was in a tree-hungry frame of mind. I had big plans: I was going to turn the two acres of pastureland I owned into a miniature forest. So I planted every one of them: all but one would be planted in the hedge row I was planting. The final tree would be planted in my yard. None of the saplings was over 12 inches tall.
Most of them didn’t make it. Nature is a strange beast – forgiving of those plants within the embrace of its various ecosystems, but harsh on those who move to town. Taking a water-loving tree like a blue spruce and re-purposing it as part of a windbreak in an arid, grassy prairie took far more water than my meager drip-irrigation system could supply, and one by one my poor little blue spruce trees began dying off. Within a few years all but the tree in my yard were gone.
Then, one day, as I was walking the perimeter of my property, I happened to kick over a tuft of grass and discovered one of my original blue spruces, still alive and apparently well. In the three or four years since I’d planted it, that lone overhanging tuft of grass had slowed the rate of evaporation around the tiny tree just enough that it was still alive, although it had barely grown two inches. Surely there was a lesson here, something to be learned about the ferocious tenacity of life. I kicked away the grass, watered the tree copiously by hand, and assumed that sunlight and my care would allow it to flourish. It died that winter. Perhaps there was a lesson there, too.
But there is one of those trees left. The spruce in my yard, bathed in lawn sprinklers, is now well over thirty feet tall, and like its name sake, is a glorious, rich shade of blue. It was for several years the silent and secretive home to a nest of magpies, is a perch to the occasional Cooper’s hawk and refuge for any number of chickadees, house wrens and finches. My hedgerow is still a work in progress, as I learn, ever so slowly, what will work in my particular ecosystem. But my blue spruce, which towers over my house, sometimes reminds me of what could have been, and how, long ago, I might have tended to those other small lives differently.
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