you can at least see its shadow
I have the feeling that we really are finally arriving at a hopeful moment. In part it is the weather, in part the impressive evidence of the national vaccination campaign. This past weekend Joan and I broke free from what has seemed an interminable house arrest and drove thirty miles north and west through the greening countryside under bright sunshine to the beautiful country property of our elder son Richard and his wife Katie Dixon. This modest excursion induced the amount of excitement one might expect from a week in Paris.
Rich and Katie had planned a kind of working house party, at which numerous invited friends would enjoy a day in the vernal countryside and some top-quality gourmet food in exchange for a few hours’ help in planting out some seventy-five seedlings fresh from the greenhouses of the New Jersey Forest Service. We arrived mid-morning on Saturday, spent the night, and returned home not too long after the lunch hour on Sunday. In my geriatric condition I move pretty slowly (and uncertainly) and huff and puff a good deal. It’s discouraging, but my doctor advises me to take as my reference point not my youthful self but other octogenarians. By that standard things are a little brighter. Even my small contribution was helpful, since for a variety of reasons not too many other indentured servants showed up.
Among the serious damage inflicted by a series of major storms, beginning with superstorm Sandy nearly a decade ago, has been that inflicted on local woodlands. The high winds damaged or flattened many large trees, including two in our own yard, and many untended woods are difficult of access on account of the tangle of fallen branches and trunks, and the thickets of opportunistic brush growing up amidst them. There are many unpleasant aggressors just waiting for a chance, including a horrible strangler vine called China Berry or Porcelain Berry. At Richard and Katie’s place, certain windswept patches of once heavy woodland look nearly clear-cut. In ages primeval the fallen wood slowly pulverized, enriching the soil for new growth This process must have often been accelerated by terrible fires ignited by lightning. The recent forest fires in California have dramatized the dangers of building human habitations in forests that are in a “natural” or “unmanaged” state—the adjective having come to bear as much political as descriptive weight. Forest fires are less common in our forests of the Northeast, but there are many other reasons to clean up and reforest devastated patches.
Infant white pine
The New Jersey Forest Service has an annual sale of seedling trees--conifers and hardwoods—at low prices. You order them in the winter, and since the competition is hot you order them early. Richard ordered seventy-five divided among three species: Eastern white pine, white oak, and Cornelian cherry. The white oak is one of my favorite of all trees, despite the fact that one came within about six inches of killing me sixty years ago. And the prospect of a pine grove, with a breeze gently moving through the needled limbs and the sweet smell of fallen needles underfoot, is a happy one. Not that I will be around to enjoy it. I am just a one-time country boy. My son is a real naturalist and environmentalist. He has a rather purist attitude toward the Cornelian cherries, which were perhaps part of the package deal from the Forest Service. They are not a native Eastern Seabord species, but some kind of exotic import. My own view, strangely more liberal than his in this instance, is that we should to the degree possible view “invasive” botany rather as we are told to regard human migration, from a practical and welcoming point of view. The dogwoods that have been naturalized in southern woodlands are a wonderful aspect of the countryside, and I do hope to survive long enough to see some yellow blossoms on the fast-growing Cornelians at Richard’s place.
Richard had identified well in advance two or three plots, each fairly distant from the others, and marked each proposed tree site with a little flag on a wire mast, each coded by tree species. What needed to be done now was to clear debris and rocks, dig the holes and fill them with turned soil, plant the seedlings, and get them off to a running start with a generous watering. The final step was to protect them with a stout wire enclosure.
My own entire effort was directed to the inglorious final step, time-consuming but indispensable. I spent a few hours constructing the tubular cages needed to protect the seedlings from the deer, at least for a few years that could give them a good start. If unimpeded Bambi’s mother will happily chow her way through your entire vegetable garden in half an hour. When browsing over the open forest floor she will snap up almost any inviting green sprout or interesting tender bark she sees poking up through the earth. The staggering profligacy of arboreal reproductive effort—think of the number of acorns produced by a single mature oak--attests to the daunting prospects awaiting any particular seed. Foraging animals are not the least of the challenges.
The raw materials for my personal task were some heavy rolls of soldered wire fencing five feet high with a grid of two inches by four inches; my only tool was a fine old pair of industrial pliers with a keen wire-cutting edge. My workshop was the driveway in front of the house. I first cut length of a hundred inches, a bit over eight feet, with one edge trimmed even with the vertical and the other left with the two-inch prongs of wire left free. I then joined the two long sides to make a circle, bending the two-inch prongs back upon themselves to suture the wire into a latticed tube. This takes a little skill and considerable hard work. It is fairly heavy gauge wire, and bending short pieces of it accurately is hard work. But you end up with a mesh tube five feet high and more than thirty inches in diameter which, when properly installed atop the planted seedling, offers reliable protection for an indefinite period. I did the better part of a roll on Saturday, and a full one on Sunday, or about twenty individual tubular fences. Richard had done a large number before I arrived. Altogether I think that fifty of the trees are now in the ground, most if not all with their mesh protection.
Being on the fence is seldom an admirable position. But in this ambiguous world in which imperfection characterizes so many of our actions, it is a pleasure to participate in something so unambiguously wholesome as planting trees. Not that I in fact actually planted any over the weekend. But they also serve who only stand and wait, as Milton says. Waiting with me I had from time to time a delightful young granddaughter who will, I hope, soon enough see the seedlings outstripping her in height. And as a first premonition of post-pandemic possibility, our arboreal weekend is likely to remain long and happily in the family memory.
most photos by Richard A. Fleming
