Trees to Avoid
I have a new ritual of inhabiting our backyard at night. The solitude and darkness hold me. I look at our dark house and silently bless those within. I bless the houses of my neighbors. Then I look up at the trees. Even in the dark, I can see that the ancient ginkgo is leafing out. We love this tree. It shades our house and patio. It is flamboyantly golden in the fall and, like all ginkgos, drops its leaves all in one day, in mid-November. Drama queen!
The other night, as I admired the ginkgo, my eyes wandered to the left, to the old sweetgum that shelters the chicken coop. We can’t easily see it from the house, because it’s behind the ginkgo, but we know its seed pods – or “monkey balls” – well. Over time, they have covered the roof of the coop, and it’s hard to pick them off, so we don’t.
But on this night, as I inspected the dark silhouette of the sweetgum, I was struck by its awkwardness: its lopped-off and broken branches, its crookedness. I wondered, is it jealous of the ginkgo? Does the ginkgo have contempt for the sweetgum’s lack of style? Or do they rejoice in each other?
Behind me, with branches reaching over my head, is the black walnut, the tallest tree in the yard. The whole tree bends slightly toward the south. Why? Every other year or so, it drops hundreds of tennis-ball-sized nuts, encased in impenetrable green shells, that we curse and stick in a pile somewhere. The black walnut is best admired from the hammock, on a June afternoon.
At one time, we had an even taller tree, a tulip poplar that lived next to the black walnut, but we had to have it cut down in 2005. I can still hear the sickening thuds as sections of the trunk fell to the ground, shaking the house. Its utter straightness was a counterpoint to the black walnut’s southward sway. Or was it more of a sway away from the tulip poplar? I suspect the tulip poplar had a self-righteous streak. But does the black walnut grieve its partner?
To sabotage my ruminative mood, I went back in the house and looked up ginkgo, black walnut, and sweetgum. All of them exist on an Angie’s List page of “Trees to Avoid.” Something about “messy,” “smelly,” and “poisonous.” I snapped the laptop shut and went back outside.
The drizzle that I had been trying to ignore turned into a light rain. The sky was almost violet, strangely light considering it was a new moon and cloudy. I didn’t tell the trees what the internet said. As the rain continued to fall, I blessed them, and felt their silence blessing me.
