MindSpinner

I am a gardener. I play botanical favorites all the time, pore over catalogs through the gray months of winter, order too many plants, and wear myself out getting them all in the ground. (It’s June, and I have six red-twig dogwood still to go.) If planting and tending is half of what I do, however, the other half is weeding, culling the upstarts.

This is the first year I’ve discarded a living tree (excluding the annual ritual sacrifice of a severed Frazier fir for the holidays). It was a little crabapple, cultivar unknown, sold cheap off the back of a truck the September after I moved into my new house. It nearly died two years ago, had to be cut way back into a stumpy version of its taller self, and then fell victim to deer scraping the velvet from their antlers. It was diseased.

All these are all excuses. Where it was, truth to tell, I wanted an October Glory Maple. I have gawked at October Glory Maples for years and bought this spring the sort of specimen I could afford: a 3′ sapling, bare root, ordered from Musser Forests. It was a three-year tree, not much more than a rooted stick that grew leaves as the weather warmed. Actual branches will come next year.

Envisioning the vibrant red of the maple in fall and a garden bench couched in its someday shade, I dug up the little crab I had been coaxing along with weekly bucketfuls of water during the dry months. I dug it up with force and determination, shook the dirt from its roots, and threw it back into the woods, out of sight, where there are lots of bits of dead trees - a woody graveyard. I wasted no time. I was being a sensible gardener. I was making a breakthrough, a hard decision. I’d already planted all the trees the yard will hold. There was no place for a sick, stubby crabapple tree that still bloomed bravely in spring. No neighbor would want it. I planted the October Glory Maple in its place and conjured in my mind’s eye the spreading limbs of the shade tree.

Still, I felt like a murderer - there was no residual sense of victory; guilt instead remained. When I had lunch with a former student the day after the deed, I told her about digging up the tree. She wrote an e-mail only today and said, “I hope you’re enjoying your time off and not getting into too much trouble or murdering any more foliage ;->.”

The truth is that we gardeners murder foliage all the time. In a conceptual move duplicated by every army that ever went to war, we designate our enemies by naming them so and then ranting about their offenses. A weed is simply a plant in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a weed is a weed especially if it is likely to spawn reinforcements. Armed with such rationalizations, which have served us for millennia, we tear up the most opportunistic foliage and insist on cultivating that which has to be mollycoddled and defended against invasive species.