It was time to cut the young London planes in front of the Metropolitan Museum again. Predictably, I woke around three a.m. with the anxious fear that this time I had done something really wrong. It was too late or the weather was too cold or too warm, or something exceptional and bad was going to happen. I was going to cut too much or too little. I was a mess, but the trees are faithful. It was when I touched them and looked up through the whorl of their growing branches that my anxiety subsided.
I had found many wonderful advisers in my journey to figure out how to prune them, but above all, the trees themselves have been my teachers. The woods brought us from the Neolithic to the edge of the modern world. They showed us how to work with them and with one another in a way that was good for all. I had started out looking for a book of instruction, and instead found a way of life that had brought us from the mesolithic to the modern. It involved not just trees, not just people, but each bringing help to the other.
The more I learned from the generosity of the trees themselves and of the people who still work among them, the less I felt the need for a set of rules. I had expected to have to shape my London planes and to nurse them along, but it is they who have been carrying me. They are smarter, stronger, older, longer living, and more generous than I am. They respond to my tentative efforts with dozens of beautiful stems. If one is not where I wanted it and I rub it out, they accept the gesture and shift their pattern of making. They appear unfazed that I want to keep them unnaturally young, always demanding new first-year stems of them. Even where a stem is weakened by the shade, the tree sends out another suggestion for my consideration. When I do my winter quadrille among them—winding in and out and twirling all the way around each, in order to see them clearly and assess the health of trunk and branch—I feel I am beginning to know each both as a responsive individual and as part of a young colony.
The London plane trees are teaching us the art of growing in place. It isn’t natural to a human being, and we are not yet very good at it, but it is an art. We can make the cuts properly and each branch will live, but how beautiful will they be as they grow up? Will they make the rose window of shadow in winter? Will they be a pagoda of big maple-shaped leaves in the summer? An arborist is taught that trees arrange and dispose their branches so as best to let each leaf catch sun. We are faced with the need to help to make it so. In a naturally growing tree, it looks so effortless, and the results are often lovely. Working with each plane, we see how intricate are the chances and the choices.
Even today, they show me how they can serve a city. Our four little groves of London planes are not only strange and beautiful. They are also as right in their place as my favorite tall invading English elms are in the edge of the Central Park forest nearby. By staying small on the paved plaza, the planes do not grow big heavy branches, which they might drop in a storm on an unfortunate passerby. With the annual pruning, their roots too remain small. They do not buckle the pavement, lift the sidewalk, or create lips of concrete upon which a person might trip. They cast a shade that is cooling but not too deep and wide. Other plants can grow among and beside them. You can sit beneath them happily, without feeling dwarfed. In winter, they are beginning to cast an intricate web of shadow. You can even plant them under things like utility lines, without having to disfigure their branches to keep them out of the wires. They have a place beside us still, although today the cut sprouts serve only to make a playful wattle fence.
Trees return. Cut them. Chop them. Burn them. Bend them flat. And back they come again. There is no greater force on Earth than is shown in the power and persistence of branching. And certainly none more cheerful. Henry David Thoreau fire-coppiced a hundred acres of woodland early one spring in Concord. By autumn, the space was “clad in a fresher and more luxuriant green” than anything around it. The sprouts put heart in him. “Surely this earth is fit to be inhabited, and many enterprises may be undertaken with hope,” he wrote, “where so many young plants are pushing up.”
Tell me about it! The planes sprouted beautifully, despite my fears, but one hectic afternoon on the edge of June, I just didn’t care. Here I was diligently learning to practice a rightly dying art, while I live in an age in which knowledge is communicated at the speed of light. Who cares about those old slow ways? The yard door stuck when I tried to open it. I had to kick it. It sprang open, framing the E. B. White willow. The fish-skin bark of the young trunks was shining with vigor. Each pollard cut we had made in March had sprouted a dozen new stems, every pencil-thick wand at least three feet long and covered in yellow-green leaves. This tree had probably been talking to me for all of the five years it spent there, but only now did I hear it.
I remembered the old willow in the Manhattan garden. As big and strong as the trunk had looked, it had been the plant’s weakest point: hollow, fragile, buckling under its own weight, scarcely connected to a few decaying roots. Though once it had sustained a tall and lovely tree, nothing we could do would save it. It was too sick to fruit and set seed. QED. End of tree. We only learned the truth by accident, when we stuck a few of its young sticks in the ground: The trunk was dying, but the willow was not. The twigs sprouted roots, stems, and leaves, the only three organs that a tree needs. Since then, we have started hundreds of new trees from the first-year sprouts of our blooming young willow.
What if new life does not come only from the centers of power, wealth, resource gathering, and exchange? What if it comes too from the margins, the extremities, the growing tips, the sprout lands? Maybe new ways will come to us from places distant in time or space or both, where a living connection to the world renews. Maybe they will come from Grinde Farm, Osawa, Bradfield Wood, Leitza, Tohno, Beasore Meadow, the Somerset Levels, Hiyachine Shrine, Pasaia, Jolster, Kilimi, Etxarri Aranatz, Shiwa, Sumita, Star Carr, Federsee, Diss Mere, Sirok Nyírjes, Misterfals, Kussalid, Sakuragaoka. . . . Places we never heard of, times beyond our lives.