Every November, the dawn redwood turns a beautiful russet and drops its needles. When we planted it, over twenty years ago, it was only three feet tall, but it’s now closer to fifty feet, its high branches dotted with clusters of small cones.
It’s even taller even than our white birch — which we planted in the summer of 2000 — with whom it shares the upper canopy of our backyard. I’m grateful for these trees because they shield us from the neighboring apartment buildings and offer the illusion that we’re living in a forest. This illusion is one of the great pleasures of the city, as best described by JK Huysmans in Against the Grain, when his main character, Jean des Esseintes, after visiting an English pub in Paris, decides that he doesn’t need to go through the hassle of actually visiting the UK because he has experienced its essence in Paris.
All gardens are to some degree an exercise in this kind of pleasure and artifice, which I suspect largely explains why absentee landlords often have no compunction about cutting them down. To them, the tree represents a chore, whereas to those who live with the tree, it is living entity to be loved and cared for. I have seen this kind of dynamic unfold in the neighborhood. The absentee landlord will ask why they should keep a tree if it costs them even fifteen minutes of their time; it would better, they reason, to have that fifteen minutes to pursue something else, like chartering a yacht in Greece or buying a ‘Ford F-150 Raptor’ for $90,000 USD. Time is money, and so long as their building is occupied and generating income, they don’t care if the tenants are surrounded by concrete. It’s another reason we need a strong government. In the same way that there are laws requiring that apartments have windows, we could also pass laws mandating that courtyards have trees. Everyone would be happier except for the absentee landlord, and isn’t that a good result?
I’m not an absentee landlord or a tenant, so I’m happy to spend a few minutes each fall cleaning out the gutters and sweeping up the leaves. This week, as I attended to these tasks, I paused to admire the late-November sun streaming through the trees and felt grateful to have had the chance to plant these trees and to have watched them grow to such heights. They are my children and they don’t ask for much.
I was also thankful for the smaller Japanese maple in our garden, which has turned a perfect shade of red.
This tree grows much slower than its brethren, but it has still grown significantly since we planted it. With its elegantly twisting branches, it’s a good reminder that some things get more beautiful as they age.
I admired the drooping, yellow leaves of the climbing hydrangea, even though it’s given us headaches because of its refusal to stick to the wall and its annual infestation of mealy bugs.
As I swept the path, I was carried far away but knew exactly where I was, which is a feeling I’m always thankful to have.
