Holy Tree Trunks, Batman! It's public housing for critters!

We got the good news yesterday: we’re expecting! No, come down off the ceiling you guys, this is not a midlife-crisis pregnancy I’m talking about. I’m not having any obstetrics and ultrasounds–will gladly leave that to much better suited (and -aged) women, thankyouverymuch–and I haven’t got a pretty heifer on hand and headed for calving either, like Celi’s beautiful bossy Daisy (she is rather independent-minded, that cow).

We’re having a baby tree.

Our city has a pretty nifty organization dedicated to ecological soundness and progress, and they sponsor an annual tree giveaway, a free young sapling to any homeowner in the city. They give away hundreds a year to first-come-first-served applicants who can choose between a handful of varieties each time and hope they asked early enough to get their first choice. Last year we had just moved into our house and were delighted to be granted a five-foot redbud “stick” in a three gallon pot, a baby that as I’m looking out the window now has about three slender branches starting to give it a little less strictly vertical look, and big heart-shaped leaves fluttering in the midday breeze.

This year I’m happy to learn we get our first choice again and will become proud parents of a Mexican Plum sapling. I’m going to add it to our front yard along with the redbud, where I hope that the two modest flowering trees will grow in to eventually be mature enough to together fill the gap that will inevitably be left when the big, beautiful flowering pear out there gives up the ghost, as I’m told they tend to do in a rather moderate lifespan of 25 or 30 years (this one, given its size and the age of the house, may well have about 20 years under its bark already). Then I’ll still have blooming trees to complement the fabulous old Post Oaks in the front garden.

Can you tell we’re big fans of trees here? When you know that both my husband and I grew up in the Evergreen State, surrounded by Douglas firs and a kazillion other varieties of trees, and that we moved to a state we knew full well would have hot summers (though we couldn’t have guessed quite how relentlessly and blisteringly hot this year), you can’t be surprised to hear that we house-hunted by tree. That is, houses without sufficient trees around them were instantly crossed off our list, while even a so-so prospect as a building might get a go at least temporarily if it ‘gave great tree’. So we were over the moon at finding a nice place set among three old oaks (the one in the back is a Red Oak) and two mature flowering Bradford pears, and fronting a small ravine that is packed with a mix of wonderful trees. Not only do we get the heat-and-light filtering of these beauties, but we get a constant stream of birds and all of the other creatures to which the trees offer shelter and food and comfort.

This summer was extraordinarily stressful for the trees around here, and many, even in our mostly automated watering neighborhood, died. It’s inevitable but a heartrending sight, a rusty brown pine amid the hardier green oaks, letting its long silky needles stiffen and hang lower and lower as if in mourning for its own loss. A big magnolia and oak, standing side by side with their branches now utterly winter-bare and their bark peeling back and pulling away from the trunks that can no longer feed themselves. It’s a bitter thing, dying, for an ancient tree as well as for all of the birds and beasts and bugs that suffer for its loss. And for the people who lose just that much more fresh, filtered air, that spot of shade, that green-roofed place of peace.

So I am doubly happy when I hear we’re getting this new tree. A different kind than those I’ve known, a little adventure in seeing and growing something out of my ordinary ken. One that will show us that it’s spring with a splash of bloom as it grows up, even if the Texas weather trends forbid that we should figure out it’s spring in other ways. One that will someday set fruit fit for jam or juice, or maybe just bejeweled gifts for the birds and beasts and bugs that celebrate the finding of another tree.

I love that despite the sometimes arid and definitely less plant-diverse region here than what I used to know, my home’s embraced by such a wealth of trees. Oaks of many kinds, ornamental pears, a soapberry sapling that I hope will also rise up into a great feeding station for the birds, magnolias and mulberries and pines around the block; trees that make me think for just a moment that even a place of drought remembers its fecundity and grace give me a kind of nourishment that all the birds and beasts and bugs can take for granted but I hope that I do not. An infant human is a lovely thing, to be sure, as is a newborn calf. But for me, for now, nothing is better news than that I’ll soon have another tree to plant and someday sit beneath.

Worth more than its weight in gold