We take care of trees in New York City. We had never seen a tree we didn’t like, with the possible exception of this one. It had been right in the middle of one of the loveliest common gardens in Manhattan. It had amounted to a trunk as big in girth as a water main and as long as a New York City bus standing on its windshield. Like a pipe, the shaft was almost entirely hollow, with a thin veneer of sound wood enclosing the vacant cylinder. Atop this stem, and here and there along its sides, sprouted anemic twigs and branchlets, trickles of life leaking out of the hulk. A year or two prior to our becoming its caretakers, someone had removed most of the branches in the tree’s crown, for reasons unknown, though likely because the sound wood in the trunk was gossamer thin, and the crown teetered on it like a flowerpot set atop a cylinder of cardboard, ready to collapse on passersby. Perhaps, too, many of the branches had died. There was a cable tethering the top of the tube to another, sounder tree nearby.
What was this cadaverous willow doing there? we asked. A willow is the very definition of vigor. If one of them falls over, it invariably sprouts. A storm-broken branch makes a new tree where it landed, or more likely a new grove. A line of willows on the Somerset Levels, a very flat bottomland of rivers, wetlands, and peat bogs in the southwest of England, has had its branches cut back again and again for millennia—a practice called pollarding—each season yielding new straight and pliable stems. There are still companies that weave these into beautiful salmon-colored wattle fences, the warp and weft so tight that it resembles fine cambric shirting seen under a microscope. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the Indians burned off willows and turned the returning young sprouts into fish traps that now and again an enterprising explorer—usually under twelve years old—will turn up with wonder in a backwater, exposed by drought. Thoreau met a pair of Irish boys catching fish with what they called a Dully Chunk, a four-foot length of new-sprouted willow stem with a horsehair noose at the end. They would slip it gently over a resting fingerling pike, and jerk the creature unceremoniously out of the water, the flexing of the willow wand sealing the trap. Willows are world-champion sprouters, but the tree we faced was scarcely sprouting at all. It obviously had serious root decay. Might we get permission to remove it?
Heaven forbid! It turned out the tree was famous. E. B. White had written about it in an essay entitled “Here Is New York” in Holiday magazine in 1949. In the article, he had distilled into a form that still brings tears to my eyes the reasons that those of us who love that city do so. New York is not a monolith, he claimed, but a tight and squirming breeding ball of tiny neighborhoods, each with its own independent suppliers: its dry cleaner, its bodega, its haberdasher, its shoe repair shop, its newsstand, its fruit stand, and in his day still its ice and coal shed. The city welcomed people from everywhere on a footing of at least tolerance and at most embrace. Each person came with a dream in their hearts, a scheme in their heads, or a manuscript in their suitcase. A place where 8 million hopes interwove. White wrote, “A poem compresses much in a small space, and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.” New York City was to him a great poem, where the celebrated rubbed up against the strung-out, the greatest art against the meanest theft, the merchant prince against the gypsy king.
At the end of the piece, he had raised the then novel specter of atomic destruction. “A single flight of planes,” he wrote, “no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.”
What did he have to set against this horror?
You have guessed it: the cadaverous, threadbare willow. He described it as “long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire, but beloved of those who know it.” If that tree were to go, he wrote, the whole city would go. As long as it could be saved, then New York would remain.
Uh-oh.
So.
We did our duty to nurse it. We pruned it as though it were a bonsai, twice annually, keeping every living stem as perfectly exposed to the sun as we could. We cleared back the branches of nearby trees to give the willow the advantage. We kept back competitors in the root zone. We encouraged its absorbing roots with humic and fulvic acids. And we added three more cables—one of wire and two of more flexible polypropylene—to keep it in place. For about five years, we preserved it safe and more or less alive.
Then, during an early spring inspection of the garden, I noticed that a cable had failed. It hadn’t broken in the middle. The wood had cracked at the attachment point, broken away like a piece of pottery. We had long since stopped putting our weight on the tree. We got to the top—the climber depending on a rope attached to the branches of a nearby maple—in order to inspect the hollow stem. There was almost no wood left. It was indeed thinner than crockery and not much stronger. Cracks were forming where two other cables were attached. We reluctantly asked permission to remove it.
The owners at length agreed that there was no choice. We took the tree down one fine spring day. You could have framed round paintings with each cross section of the trunk wood. There were two dead roots at the base that had already begun to buckle. Surprisingly perhaps, Grand Central Station, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building did not shudder or collapse as we hauled the last of it away. A New York Times reporter got wind of what had happened and wrote a story portraying us as the unfortunates who had had to do the dastardly deed. On the contrary, we actually felt that we had in the course of nursing the tree come to love it, and like hospice practitioners we had lovingly laid it to rest.
Little did we know that mortality was foreign to it.
Most of the tree had gone into the chipper to make mulch. We had a few unchipped branches. I took three slender young poles from the tree and stuck them in the dirt in the back corner of our yard in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Each was about the size of a broom handle.
Just in case. Or as a memorial.
Then I went away and forgot all about them.
That fall, we were taking inventory of the trees in the yard.
| Honey locusts: | 6 |
| Willow oaks: | 2 |
| Kentucky coffee trees: | 4 |
| Serviceberries: | 3 |
What was that knot of slim yellow leaves back in the corner? Not another willow oak, although it looked like one. This tree wasn’t balled in burlap or container grown. It was coming out of the dirt that ordinarily we’d take to use on planting sites.
My god, it was the willow!
I bushwhacked my way back to its corner. All three of the broomsticks had sprouted and were growing vigorously. So much for its being a dying tree! I was reminded of the wonderful crazies in Germany and England who had recently designed and planted scale models of cathedrals, made of willow wands. They sprout. You can visit them in Taunton, Somerset, in Great Britain and in Auerstedt, Germany. We thought it a pretty good witticism to have made a building that grows, but in our willow we had a genuine vegetable resurrection.
All that the willow had needed was a fresh set of roots, and the tree’s removal, surprisingly enough, had provided them. The cambium, that thin layer of regenerative cells that lies not far beneath the bark of every woody creature, say botanists, with their latinate palaver, is totipotent. Had they been Stan Lee or one of his Marvel minions, they would have been frank and just called the cambium All Powerful. Same difference. The cambium can make from scratch any part of the tree it needs, roots included. When our fresh-cut broomsticks had entered the dirt, the all-powerful cambium had remarked, “Hmm! Looks like we need roots here.” And out they came.
With hope in our hearts, we left the new grove alone. Within a year, the three stems had grown into a large clumped, multistem tree. Five years later, it was by far the tallest thing in the yard. Our landlord called to complain that the leaves were blocking up the gutters. We cleaned the gutters and cut back the tops. Undaunted, they returned the same year to where they had been, and tacked on another foot and a half for good measure. Now we must pollard the tops annually. When I look out the office window, there it waves, about thirty-five feet tall and growing, the broomsticks now as thick as lampposts.
So willy-nilly, the famous willow is still protecting New York City. It is just that for the present it has moved to Brooklyn.
When we are upset with some new bureaucratic silliness in the city or when we see Manhattan turning into the Isle of the Rich, it occurs to us that we could use the willow to our advantage. If New York City’s safety and well-being depend upon it—according to the revered E. B. White—perhaps we could address the city father, thus, in a gruff voice:
“Mr. Mayor, we have your tree.”
After all, without it, the city might, as White opined, just go.
We are, however, a part of that neighborhood breeding ball that still is wriggling and alive on the outskirts of the golden circle. We still more or less believe in things like White’s willow. We might use a sprout from it to catch a fish, but extortion is not in its repertoire.
We have had a better idea. Every year now, we pollard the White willow in our yard, creating about a hundred straight sticks a quarter inch in diameter and two to four feet long. They are the very image of uncounted new hopes. Instead of just weaving rough fences out of them, we plant them.
Where?
Everywhere.
We are planting out every stick somewhere in New York. How many will take and grow? We have no idea, but I bet at least 5 percent. That means maybe five or six new willows per year.
Keep your eyes open. Maybe you will see one. Or more. They grow somewhere waiting for you.
If we can save enough sprouts as the mother grows, maybe we can build a small cathedral, too.