Trees are closer to God than we are and, in the anagogical sense, smarter. They have no mass of gray matter to interpose between their being and their doing. When they see a need, they fill it. In this way, they are closer to the divine, of whom it is said that His thinking and doing are one and the same. I learned this from a spaghetti wood. Even where no tree at all should have grown, it found a way.
After the genteel pruning of the Metropolitan Museum planes, it seemed a nightmare job. I was supposed to evaluate weed trees eking out a living in the shade of the hideous viaduct that carries Amtrak trains over Randall’s Island on their way out of New York’s Penn Station bound for Boston. Where this woodland sits is no place for a forest. Twenty feet east, they rehabilitate New York City feces. Fences topped in helices of razor wire surround the place. (Who could possibly want in, I wonder, or is it to keep the poop tenders from getting out?)
Each of the trestles is 100 feet high, made of puce-tinted concrete. A curve of four tracks runs over the top of them. They stand on unadorned bases, each a cruciform of nooky corners, with indents about 175 feet square. The viaduct was completed during World War I, an arc of monumental Romanesque arches that stretched improbably tall like the arcade of a twelfth-century church tortured on the rack by the Holy Inquisition. The guy who designed them had been educated in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts. This viaduct is the totalitarian nightmare of that tasteful classical design. It anticipates Mussolini’s fascist additions to Rome.
But why so high? Was it to spare the railway passengers the odor of the largest sewage treatment plant in New York? It couldn’t have been. In 1917, there was no treatment facility here, only a scattering of the other things that an urban culture wants to hide. In those days, it was hospitals for people with infectious diseases and for the criminally insane. The fact is that the aptly named Hell Gate Bridge, to which it connects, had to be built tall enough for ships to pass beneath. The Gumbyesque arches were sequelae to the bridge.
What could grow there?
Anything the wind blew in or a bird pooped out.
Now, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation wanted to make a walking and biking path in the shadow of the viaduct. This was a great idea when the wind was out of the north or west, blowing the infused fetor of the stink plant away, but when the wind was from the east or south, the path would be bathed in sticky stench. I first visited the site on an unlucky day, just as the wind shifted. The smell rolled along my nasal passages until it reached the lip of flesh that descends into the back of my mouth. From there it dripped, leaving a taste of metal and fish scraps. My nostrils were filled with a stinging vapor of shit marinated in chlorine.
How had I gotten into this job?
No matter. I had, and now I had to get done with it.
My job was to identify, locate, measure, and assess each tree. Okay. Here were three big cottonwoods in a row along a chain-link fence. Their parent’s tumbling mass of cotton had lodged against the fence, and out of its thousands of seeds, three had become young trees. On the side of the trestle facing the sewage plant—where in fact the sun was much better—two or three Norway maple seeds had blown into the cruciform angle and sprouted. The three trees leaned out toward the light, reaching beyond the edge of the high tracks. (Because the roof was a railroad line, rain could come through, but little light did.) Behind the Norway maples on the long edge of the trestle cross, deep under the tracks, two catalpa mustachios had taken root. They must have been surprised to find themselves not only in the shade cast by the trestle, but also behind the notoriously dark shade of fast-growing Norway maples. They had answered the challenge by growing out at an angle as steep as a jibboom, reaching south along the length of the trestle and then bending around beyond the maple leaves, toward the east light. In the next bay, an ailanthus seed had lodged against the trestle base. Accident or mowing had taken it down again, and five sprouts had arisen from the former root crown, turning the ailanthus into a multistem shrub. In another situation, one of the stems would likely have outraced the others, making a sort of queen and her court. Here, beneath the trestle, where it was a virtue to stay low enough to get the morning and evening light, the ailanthus shrub was happy to squat and spread. It was a teeming democracy of sprouts.
As I saw one after another of these heroic lurchings and burstings, I not only stopped despising the job, I began to enjoy it as much as any other tree inventory I had ever done. A couple of trestles to the south, I felt I was present at the birth of a world, one that showed the limitless creativity of sprouts. I came upon a black locust with its spiny stipules at each node. Like the catalpa and ailanthus, it had arisen in an inauspicious place, midway under the tracks. Little rain, little sun. “What to do?” mused the tree, and it instantly answered. It had begun to imitate the ailanthus shrub, putting out sprouts from the root crown at its base, making itself into a low multistem instead of a tall tree. Then too, it had sent out long superficial roots in all directions, not just as water carriers, I saw, but as an advance guard. Along the length of two of the roots, where better sun beckoned, the roots sent up reiterations, new young trees springing right out of the roots. There were nine of them on two roots, stretching farther and farther into the light. This was a very intelligent tree, or was it ten?
Black locust is so good at this game that most state forest agencies fulminate against it. “Black locust is difficult to control, due to its rapid growth and clonal spread,” lamented the Missouri Department of Conservation. “Mowing and burning largely have proven only temporarily effective due to the tree’s ability to spread vegetatively.” Any one of the Indians of this continent could have told them that, without need for elaborate studies, since they had been burning woods to get the trees to sprout for about ten thousand years. The black locust is unusually talented in this regard, since it sprouts both from the swelling collar at the base of the plant and prolifically from the roots, not to mention from the trunk and branches. In fact, a stand of the plant in any wood is likely to travel by root suckers, so that a black locust grove has the oldest trees at its center, younger and younger ones on the periphery. Today, this behavior is regarded as a nuisance, though in the past it was highly valued, since the wood of the black locust is hard to beat for fence posts and doorsills and teepee frames. It does not decay in contact with the ground.
The prize of this spaghetti forest was on the west side of Trestle 79. Not many trees grew on this side of any of the pillars. The best light was from the east side. The west was higher and drier, and shaded by the Triborough Bridge. Like it or not, however, here is where a lot palm came up. (Lot palm is one of the fanciful if insulting names by which ailanthus is known. Ghetto palm and stink tree are others.) It was stuck in the darkest interior corner of the northwest cruciform base. It didn’t have a chance. But ailanthus is resourceful. It can send up sprouts from the roots, the root crown, and the bole and the branches of the tree. In nature, more than 90 percent of all ailanthus trees have grown not from a seed but from some kind of sprout.
It died back once or maybe twice. Sprouts came from the root crown. It sent two roots pile-driving north, and others that looped around the inside corner, like arms joined to return a volleyball. More sprouts came from the lariat loop of root. Now the tree had six reiterated stems. One was trapped back in the deepest shade and would never amount to much. Two were heading north in a steep climb that left them with light both from west and east. Three more had used their advance position to reach out for as much western light as they could gather. And I will bet that those two northbound roots—they looked like the twin tailpipes of some skeletal hot rod—are now well out of the trestle’s shade and heading wherever they find water and air. It was a big, self-gathered bouquet of a tree, held out to whoever was willing to see it. It was as though the bones of a prehistoric creature had decided to change kingdoms and build themselves into an improbable plant, a spaghetti tree, looping and draping and floating, turning what was once a simple repetitive shape into a unique and plastic growing pile. The seed had sprouted. A trunk had formed. It had died back to the ground. Two more sprouts had come from its edges. A root had reached south. It had hit the edge of the trestle and bent west. There, two sprouts had come up. Another root had headed due west. The two had met. There, another sprout emerged. . . .
I had stopped hating the job and almost stopped smelling it. Who could have imagined that such a thing would happen? Houdini could not have better escaped from a fatal prison. What had done this feat? Just a couple of dumb weed trees. No brain. No nerves. No blood. No instincts. No plans. Just a couple of dumb trees. Right?
Not only the lowly invasive black locust and lot palm can perform this feat. Almost any tree around the world can do it one way or another. Cut down a four-hundred-year-old coast redwood, and eight or nine redwoods will spring back. Knock the tree over, and its trunk will sprout a linear grove of youngsters (see page 232). Out on the isolated Galápagos, when a thirty-foot-tall endemic giant cactus keels over, a dozen new cacti spring from the nodes where its paddle stems were joined. Roots of a Canadian white spruce forest join forces beneath the ground, keeping a mere stump alive while the stump’s roots help feed the rest of the grove. Deep in the shade of the hemlocks sprout apparently seedling beech trees. In fact, they are sprouts from the roots of a mother tree two hundred yards away. The mother supports the young, waiting perhaps for a hemlock to fail or blow down, so the young can race for the sun.
When a wound occurs anywhere on a stem, there are at least twenty ways that sprouts can go. About half make new roots, half new stems. Roots can form high in the crown to harvest water that gathers in the axils of leaves or in stem unions; roots can grow and hang down until they reach the ground, a kind of vine in reverse; or roots can sprout where decay is occurring, taking nutrition from the tree’s own compost. Roots can also grow from callus tissue on a trunk wound, reaching down inside a hollow stem until they reach the ground. Roots can grow from a new coppice shoot, from low on the trunk into the soil, making stilts, from other dying roots, from suckers, or from rhizomes. New stems can sprout from dormant buds or direct from the cambium high in the crown, or they can sprout from callus tissue on branches or on the trunk, or from up and down the length of a wounded branch. New stems can rise from the collar as coppice, from old or adventitious roots, a new shoot on young coppice, or as sprouts from rhizomes or tillers or as layered sprouts from the tips of the branches when they dip to touch dirt. Some say the entire body of a tree is a source of repetitions of itself.
Trees are among the most creative creatures on Earth. What we do with words in language—making infinite combinations out of finite structures and finite parts—trees do with their branches out of their flesh. Their creativity is intrinsic, ours is extrinsic.