Our property is host to many wonderful trees, some of them slightly — or considerably — past their prime of life. Every couple of years we hire a local tree company to assess, prune, cable and otherwise maintain them.
Last fall during a routine check-up, the arborist noticed that one of a pair of mature black locusts behind our house was leaning dramatically. When we bought the house 13 years ago, the tree had a slight tilt, but in the intervening years the angle has gotten decidedly more pronounced. Seeing the tree through the fresh eyes of the arborist was startling. “Holy cow,” I said to my husband, “that tree is practically lying down!”
The arborist also detected a large fungal mass at the tree’s base and told us that the tree was beyond saving. He warned that if the locust were to fall it would crush a lovely red Japanese maple — another elder statesman among our trees — that we have been working hard to keep healthy. So the decision seemed obvious: remove the dying locust before it fell of its own accord, taking out the maple with it. We went on to discuss other issues, like tackling a patch of woolly adelgid that had recently appeared on a row of hemlocks in the back yard.
A few weeks ago, out of the blue, I received an email from the tree company letting me know that a crew would be coming out the next day to remove the dying locust. A decision we’d made months earlier was suddenly upon us. The reality loomed large. We knew this would be a major operation that would take the better part of a day. The crew arrived just before 8 a.m. I watched nervously as the equipment was unloaded from the flatbed: grapple skidder, bucket truck, cherry picker, chipper. These machines brought me back to long ago days when our son Tommy — now a professor of medieval Persian culture at a university in Germany—had an obsessive, encyclopedic knowledge of trucks and heavy machinery. Back then, construction sites became amusement parks, and long car trips were entertaining parades of intriguing motor vehicles. I texted photos of the mechanical menagerie to Tommy with the message: “Wish you were here!”
My obliviousness over the intervening months had shielded me from the stark reality I now confronted. The removal of the tree was painful for me to watch, but I could not look away. The crew worked slowly and methodically, each move, each cut, each pull seemed graceful, steady and sure. A hawk perched for a while in a neighboring tree. Maybe it was scouting for potential prey sent scurrying into the open by the noisy disruption. Or was it wondering about the fate of the tree? Did it realize what was happening at some deep level of animal awareness we humans can’t fathom? Was it as awestruck and mesmerized as I was by the scene? I stepped away from the window every few minutes but a shout or the noise of a falling branch drew me back. One by one the highest branches of the tree were sawed off, guided by ropes to the ground and dragged to the chipper. Then the highest lengths of the trunk were removed. At last, the final cut, a wedge sawed out near the base, accompanied by loud wrenching creaks and a thundering thunk as the trunk hit the ground.
My husband and I went outside to talk with the crew who were obviously pleased with the result of their painstaking work. The foreman told us that the trunk was hollow and that it was evident that creatures had been living inside. I felt a sharp pang of guilt knowing that we had eliminated a shelter for mice, squirrels, raccoons and other animals that struggle to survive our frigid winter weather. I imagined a delicate ecosystem of flora and fauna destroyed in a matter of hours by us. I told myself that the critters would make do somehow, find other hollow trees to call home. And besides, hadn’t we saved the Japanese maple from certain destruction. But the experience raised the question that always lurks in my mind about mankind’s efforts to curate the natural world. Everything we do is, by definition, an interference with nature. I like to think we’re learning to be more careful about the harm we inflict on the landscape with pesticides, clear-cutting of forests and other such destructive acts that we carry out in the name of “progress.” As a gardener, I try to promote conditions where pollinators will thrive, where native plants will flourish. But it’s always a balancing act, a matter of trade-offs.
Last year, for example, I finally decided to tear out an unruly sprawl of floribunda rose and bittersweet that had smothered a daylily bed and was on the march towards the house. Although I knew I could no longer hold the encroaching invasives at bay, I had mixed feelings about this operation. The entrenched tangle of vines was a perfect resting place for bluebirds and others waiting to sip and dip in a nearby birdbath. But I went ahead. Soon enough a small backhoe arrived to eradicate the rose and bittersweet, leaving an unsightly span of torn roots and rubble. I have done my best to fill this space with native shrubs and perennials, but the dread invasives are already making a comeback. And I have a hunch they’ll win in the long run. A score for the birds.
Every evening at twilight a great horned owl serenades us with its somber cry, answered by another owl further off in the distance. The other day I saw it perched right outside the house in the singleton locust tree, its silhouette on a bare branch like a big black cat against the deepening night sky. Was it mourning the loss of the tree? A moment later it was gone.
Also a correction: After my last column appeared I received an email from Nord Wennerstrom of the Cultural Landscape Foundation correcting an erroneous statement I’d made about Frederick Law Olmsted creating the Great Lawn of Central Park. Although Olmsted did design Central Park with his partner Calvert Vaux, the Great Lawn did not come into being until the mid-1930s, designed by the New York Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects on the site of a former reservoir. I apologize for this mistake!
Mickey Rathbun is an Amherst-based writer. Her latest book, The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir, was published in 2024 by White River Press.