Week 10Fall Week 10
There is much going on in your yard that would not be going if you didn’t have one or more oak trees gracing your piece of planet earth.
—Douglas W. Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks
It’s been a poor year for acorns in this yard, though it’s been a mast year for nearly every other kind of fruiting and seed-bearing plant. A cool, wet spring and a hot summer gentled by late rains, the kind of weather we haven’t seen in years, left the pokeweed plants weighted with purple berries, the redbud limbs heavy with seedpods, the hollies covered with ripening fruit. Even the new cedars are dotted here and there with drupes. I planted them for the flock of cedar waxwings that overwinters here, but they are young trees, and the local songbirds will likely clear out the berries before the waxwings arrive.
My mother’s standard measure for a new plant’s growth—“the first year they sleep; the second year they creep; the third year they leap”—still holds. This is the year the cedars are supposed to creep, and next year I can look for a decent crop of drupes. Plenty for the local birds and the cedar waxwings alike. Plenty for everyone.
From time to time, woodland trees and plants will break out into a glorious mast year, a season during which they produce an especially bountiful harvest. I had been expecting a mast year for the white oak just outside our bedroom window, but it produced almost no acorns this fall. White oaks generally mast every two to five years. Last year brought a poor yield, and the year before that was poor as well. I thought surely this year of good rain would also bring a good crop of acorns.
It takes a lot out of a tree to produce so many seeds. No one knows exactly why trees mast, though it may have something to do with producing more food than wildlife can consume, thus giving the tree’s offspring a better chance of survival. A mast year allows more animals to survive, as well, and this year there are not so many chipmunks and squirrels as there are when our oak tree masts. The blue jays seem to be doing well—they show up at my feeder as soon as I leave a fresh batch of peanuts in the tray—but they don’t hang around the yard the way they do when acorns are plentiful. There is nothing a blue jay loves better than an acorn. A blue jay, caching acorns many decades ago, may have planted this very oak.
The oak has been standing here since before our house was built, back to when this yard was still a forest. The other trees were planted in 1948 by our late backdoor neighbor, Joe, a lineman for the telephone company who came home from World War II to buy the very first house built in our neighborhood. Joe and his wife, Millie, lived downslope from the scraped lot where our house would stand two years later, and Joe was concerned about erosion. Maple trees have shallow roots that stabilize the soil, and Joe planted eighteen sugar maple saplings here, hoping to keep our soil in our yard and out of his storm cellar.
The maples’ shallow roots have cost a few of them their lives. Joe and Millie lived out sixty-five years of happy marriage in the house behind ours, but after they died, a developer tore it down, taking no care to protect the trees Joe left behind. And because tree roots don’t respect property lines, some of the builder’s heavy equipment and some of his piles of brick and lumber got dumped on roots that fed trees in our yard. I’ve been trying to replace the trees we lost ever since.
Planting a tree is a gesture of faith in the future. One year we put in new hollies and serviceberries, new southern arrowwoods. Another year it was a dogwood and a sweetbay magnolia, and the year before that a red maple sapling that came by mail from Walden Pond. Most recently it was bottlebrush buckeyes and three different varieties of pawpaws. I am already thinking about what I’ll order next year from my list of native plants our yard still lacks. A persimmon, maybe, or a Kentucky coffeetree? Both?
It’s impossible to keep pace with all the trees that have been cut down, and all the trees that have died of stress, during construction in this suddenly prosperous neighborhood. A wonderful old shingle oak across the street is dying, and the new neighbors, the ones who bought the grand house that rose in place of the modest rental where my mother lived during her final years, have not noticed yet. The tree is at the street, nowhere near the house, but the builder must have found its roots inconvenient in some way. I watched one day as three workers hacked out a major root and poured concrete into the hole where it had been. Later, a dump truck deposited soil over the concrete, and a landscaping crew installed sod on top of the dirt. Well, first they treated the soil with a pre-emergent poison to keep wildflower seeds from gaining purchase. Then they covered it with sod.
I wonder if my oak’s poor yield is tied to this slow-motion devastation, if somewhere a white oak that once lived in a now barren yard was lost without my noticing. A white oak that through the years had been my own oak’s mate, its pollen carried here on the wind.
Sometimes trees pop up, seemingly from nowhere, as gifts from the birds. We protect a volunteer black locust and a volunteer red mulberry as tenderly as any nursery-bought seedling. A volunteer hackberry already reaches to the power line. Soon we will run out of room at the margins and be forced to set seedlings down right in the middle of our yard, wherever there is space between the trees that are already here. The neighbor who does not like our leaves once told me we should cut down most of our trees. “They’re so thick it feels like the house can’t breathe,” she said.
“That’s because it can’t,” I said. “But the trees can breathe.”
That’s what I think I said, anyway. Maybe I only wanted to say it and didn’t have the nerve.
At the base of each new tree, Haywood sets a five-gallon bucket with a hole he drilled into the bottom. This was my mother’s approach for keeping young plants alive, a poor man’s drip-irrigation system. The slow release of water allows the tree’s roots time to take up moisture. As it grows, Haywood moves the bucket farther out, coaxing the roots to reach, giving them a reason to set themselves firmly into the earth. Once a tree is well established, it’s time to plant another.
Every time a beautiful old tree is lost here, I think of my mother’s indignation when the power company cut down a giant pine at the corner of our yard in Birmingham. In its place they put up a massive pole, a bright silver monstrosity more than a foot wide and at least twelve feet high. Mom called the power company every day until someone came out and painted the pole forest green. Around it she planted flowering trees and shrubs that wouldn’t grow tall enough to obstruct the power lines but would still disguise the pole. Driving by the house a few years later, you never would have known there was anything ugly within that little grove of dogwoods. In springtime all you noticed were the drifting white flowers and the mockingbird that sang there every morning and every evening and all day long.
I am older now than my mother was when she was harassing the customer-service department of the Alabama Power Company, and more and more I ponder words like bounty and replete and enough. I think of what we are losing from this world and of what we will leave behind when we ourselves are lost. The trees. The stories. The people who love us and who know we love them, who will carry our love into the world after we are gone.
I am remembering again that a family is still a family though they may live in different houses. We see each of our children from time to time, though hardly ever all of them at once. But for Thanksgiving they will be here together, and I am planning all the traditional dishes. We tried to simplify our menu the first pandemic year, when nobody from our extended families could visit, but our sons revolted. They wanted their great-grandmother’s squash dressing, which takes two days to make. They wanted their grandmother’s pecan pie. They wanted creamed spinach and sweet potato soufflé and lady peas and rolls so soft they can hardly hold the butter. Our children are coming home to gather around the same table for the first time in months, so we will make them a feast. At Thanksgiving, every year is a mast year.
Until then, I will think of my mother’s dogwoods as I fill my water buckets, repurposed from carrying to spilling. The next time Haywood and I visit the Cumberland Plateau, I’ll gather acorns to plant here and there at our house—in enough different places, I hope, for a few to escape the blue jays. With any luck, some autumn in a year I may not live to see, there will be many acorns.