Category Archives: Nature

November 22, 2015 · 3:30 pm

Putting the Season to Bed

The leaves have just about all fallen. I was able to identify a horsechestnut – compoundly palmate leaves, in other words resembling your hand – only by a few crisp specimens that hadn’t yet crumbled in the gutter.

Leaf Horse chestnut

I spent a day driving around Brooklyn visiting tree pits that had been disturbed in the process of putting in new sidewalks and that needed fresh topsoil. A young, ceaselessly energetic landscaper named Byron and I hopped from Hendrix Street to Bergen Street to Benson Avenue, giving modest Ginkgoes a light blanket of earth the color of pumpernickel. We were putting them to bed.

ginkgo topsoil

The topsoil provides nutrients for those roots that had just been nudged by shovels and backhoes, but beyond that it’s just a beautiful coating, a frame for the urban trunks and limbs that deserve the best exhibition possible. If it were me walking out my front door in the morning, I would like to see a tree with its feet in that rich, dark dirt.

Visiting tree after tree, I felt melancholy. I knew that this was the last gasp of the season for me. From now on it will be too cold to pour concrete, too frigid for planting, and an arborist has nothing to do but hibernate with the bears. This has actually been three seasons, spring, summer and fall, but it feels like one rush of communion with trees and tree culture, which I’m so grateful to have stumbled into.

I’ve loved the prehistoric looking roots of plane trees pushing out over the sidewalk. Nothing can stop them.

Plane foot

It’s difficult to tell the types of deciduous trees without their leaves, and so I don’t know whether the two dead giants that crashed across our driveway this fall were oaks or maples or sweetgums. Gil’s chainsaw rendered them into neat circles ready to decompose in pieces in the forest, the final stage in the existence of a tree. Meanwhile, the stored power of the living trees all around is banked like a fire, waiting for the warm weather, which I think of as I lie on the couch watching the kiln-seasoned logs burn in our fireplace, with half an eye watching the men wage war in Kagemusha.

Sad as I am to leave the world of trees until the end of winter, I tell myself that the change of season is not a dying, but a gathering of energy, required for the buds that will soon enough come around.

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November 11, 2015 · 7:17 pm

Lucky Charms

I’ve tried to wean myself from portents, omens, tricks of the light.

Colors that pop have always seemed to be telling me something, like these asters I saw recently at a botanical garden. I took a deep breath, feeling good things were coming my way.

Asters

Today I was on the southern shore of Staten Island, supervising tree planting in a New York City park, and everything seemed loaded with meaning. It wasn’t a cheery day, per se. The skies hung dark and grey. This body of water was Arthur Kill, off of the town of Tottenville; the view across was to Perth Amboy, probably not the most swellegant spot in the world. I was chilled beneath my fleece. Still, the sweep of the coast was ravishing.

staten island beach

Colors popped. The detritus on the beach seemed hallucinatory.

seaweed

So did the incredibly complex needle structure of the Pitch Pines (Pinus rigida) we were planting, along with sweetly bushy Junipers.

pine

A perfect little lighthouse floated in front of me. Fishing boats. Buoys. All around brambles, the vivid red of rusty blood. The near-black loam – until recently a dump filled with lovely things like burned cars – was thick with enormous weathered oyster shells. They spoke to me of good things in the past, Indian oyster feasts on the shores here, and in the future, oysters on the half shell that I would consume on ceremonial occasions. The air itself grew more briny, more aromatic, as the day went on.

I’ve always been able to say a) this wonderful thing is happening, therefore b) this wonderful thing will happen. The trouble with that is there is no actual causal relationship between felicities. Life throws things up like a packet of sparkling pins and they don’t always land back in the pincushion.

But today. We were erecting a small forest, perfect in every way. It could have been painted, a brilliant illustration.

trees in a line

One of the crew was leveling an American Sycamore in its pit. The tree held onto one leaf at its very top like a Christmas star.

Christmas sycamore

The planter, Robert, was like a cheerful Bluto, with a pierced eyebrow, an extravagant beard and those tribal lobe-stretching earrings that it was a little surprising to see on a landscaping guy. The tree was straight as a yardstick at the bottom, but leaned south with its upper limbs.

“I hope that rights itself.” I said.

“It’s like in life,” said Robert, smiling. “Everything gets better.”

The crew told me a humpbacked whale had visited just off shore a week ago, chasing baitfish. I wished I had seen it. Maybe I could come back. Now that’s a sight that would pop.

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November 6, 2015 · 7:33 pm

The Giant Killer

I’m not overwhelmed with joy about the Christmas tree that just rolled into Rockefeller Center. A Norway Spruce, the 78-foot specimen came from a town called Gardiner in upstate New York, where it towered over its owners’ diminutive house. Or diminutive in comparison, anyway. I always wonder who the tree spotters are, the tree scouts who go out and scour the countryside to find the one that will be massive enough for New York City. In this case the head gardener for Rockefeller Center got wind of the family’s shaggy green heirloom online and ventured up to see for herself.

rockefeller-christmas-tree-today-151106-tease-03_782538c28db47a386a255af98ab990ee.today-inline-large

I admit, I like my tree over the holidays, but I don’t like to see any of them cut down.

This past week I was surveying tree pits I’d worked at in the last couple of weeks to see that topsoil had been added in the right proportions. My job, of course, is saving trees by protecting the roots that come uncovered when the construction crew excavates the old sidewalk. Now I pulled around the corner and drove down 78^th Street in Brooklyn. I was looking for a sizable sugar maple (Acer saccurum), a handsome guy whose roots had been a muscular tangle that needed special care to keep them intact.

No tree. Where could it have gone? Then I saw, lying on the sidewalk, falling into the street, the maple, hacked into thick pieces. The wood was so fresh it looked wet. Sawdust and leaves, everywhere.

1)551 78 St, Brooklyn

I was sick. Who had taken the tree down, and why? I looked back at my notes, which indicated that a long, heavy branch extended over the street. That didn’t seem reason enough to lose the whole thing. You invest yourself in this living being, its branches and leaves, its stout trunk. And then it’s cut.

The man who presented his tree to Rockefeller Center recalled growing up with it, climbing its ladder of branches with his siblings, getting in trouble for getting pitch on their clothes. He said that the tree was just getting too big for his yard.

I don’t really get it. It’s just not a possibility, that I would ever take a saw to a tree because it was too large. Selfish, I know – all those happy tourists in Manhattan for the windows and the sparkly lights, yep. And the lumber’s going to go to Habitat for Humanity in January.

But when it comes down to it, we’ve killed another giant.

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November 4, 2015 · 7:40 pm

Peak’s Peaked and Pin Oak Drops

Peak has peaked. Peak has punked out.

In the great northeast in the fall we always talk about whether the leaves are peak. When you head upstate to pick apples and pumpkins you want to know: Is it peak? In other words, are the woods in all their glory?

As our peak is beginning to peter out, I began to wonder what the concept meant more precisely, so I asked the nearest folks I could find.

Gil (scanning the horizon over the marsh): Well, there is still some green and there’s brown too, so… I dunno.

Maud: Isn’t it different for everybody?

Yes, when the leaves on the trees are as yellow as butterflies, that is some person’s idea of bliss. The best ever. And when the hills are a patchwork of gold, red, orange – but it has to be a perfect day, too, with a vast well of sunshine lighting it all up – and things are going well for you, too – that’s peak for some. Identifying what is beautiful with some kind of precision, it’s a way we define ourselves.

For me, I like the browns. In fact I’m the only person I know whose preferred color is brown. Today I spent time with two handsome pin oaks, currently my favorite tree. They have the leaves with points so sharp they take their name from them, and deeply scalloped sides – called sinuses in the tree world. The pointy parts are lobes and the leaf body itself is a blade, in the department of things we all really should know.

These two fairly massive pin oaks, Quercus palustris, one with a caliper of 21 inches and one fully 26 in diameter, stood in front of a small Asian lady’s house on East 55 Street in Brooklyn, shedding acorns as our crew put in a sidewalk around their roots. Wasn’t Sir Isaac Newton inspired by an apple falling and striking him on the head? I got a lot of ideas today from acorns bonking me on my skull.

“I remember when they brought these trees here to plant them,” reminisced the homeowner, talking about the City. “Thirty years ago. They were so small. They carried them in burlap bags!”

I knew what she was talking about, having spent time last week in the Bronx planting Ginkgoes, and having held my hand against the wet burlap before the heavy root ball was set in the earth.

Today’s pin oak leaves were still green and red, but they were beginning to droop and to turn a russet brown, just the way I like them.

How we apprehend peak reminds me of when people talk about what age they are internally. You may be forty, but do you feel you are twenty-six in spirit? Sixteen? Three? (I hope not, that would be weird). I always think I am all the birthdays scrambled up. Yes, in actual years I am getting close to retirement age, but I turn on the radio and the music makes me a college student.

When I write I am no age at all. Age-free, that’s like being an angel.

Wild boars love those acorns too, but when they snort and snuffle around the oaks in the forest the fallen nuts are called mast. You don’t need to ask what is peak for a pig.

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October 20, 2015 · 2:41 pm

Found Wanting

Here is what I don’t miss about living the life of a writer, the life I lived for 25 years of adulthood. I realized recently that even when I was happy and fulfilled, publishing my work, novels and nonfiction, I was continually in a state of wanting.

I wanted to write a good sentence.

… wanted to write a good paragraph.

…wanted … a page, a chapter, a book.

I wanted a jackpot, to win the lottery of book advances, to have publishers wrangle over my work.

I wanted my editor to pay attention to me .

… wanted him to love my book.

… wanted my publishing company to go all in on it, devote thought and resources to promoting it. I wanted to punish them when they didn’t: want, want, want.

Oh, you’re a writer, people always said. And it was fantastic to be that creature, a writer. Except when it wasn’t.

I wanted to see my book in the world.

I wanted to see the cover in a bookstore window.

I wanted readers.

… wanted readers to love my book.

… wanted readers to talk about my book, to talk to me about my book.

I wanted to talk about my book.

… wanted to talk to readers about me.

… wanted to talk in front of audiences.

… wanted to hear applause.

I wanted my book to be reviewed.

… reviewed in The New York Times.

…(USA Today would be okay.)

…I wanted notices in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.

…I wanted those reviews to be starred.

…I wanted people to read the reviews and buy my book.

I wanted my peers to read my book.

I wanted people to see me in my book.

Oddly enough, I got all these things, just not enough. Could it ever be enough?

When I decided to take a hiatus from publishing I freed myself from all the wants. I didn’t know it would happen, that I would become an arborist, just that I needed a job and loved the idea of saving trees.

Wants are painful, even if you get what you want some of the time. You know the jewel-toned leaves on the forest floor, dreams right in front of you? You can touch them, but you can’t possibly collect them all. I was always caught up in the desire, and the reality invariably fell short. Gautama Buddha: Desire is the cause of all evil.

What do I want now that my work is so different? I want to be wantless. What’s right in front of me every day: a strong cup of coffee. A restroom near the site. Clear weather. Protecting a root. Seven hours of sleep. The foreman smiling at me, chewing his cigar. (He doesn’t know I’m a writer, and couldn’t care.) Not having to endure too much of a logjam on the drive back home. And again, saving a root. Simple.

Saving a root, I am saving myself.

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October 14, 2015 · 2:46 pm

Mrs. Chekhov

I came around the corner to Dahill Street in Brooklyn on a Tuesday morning, wearing my orange safety vest, and there stood a little old lady with a neat blue dress and the white helmet coif that showed she spent time once a week at the beauty salon. Just standing there at the gate of her Brooklyn-red-brick house. Waiting for something.

Out of nowhere, she pulled me aside. Sometimes the vest serves as an invitation. “There’s a very good Italian place down the block,” she said. “Oh, he makes very good sandwiches.”

Not too many Italian delis around here these days, I thought, it’s mainly kosher now. Plus the streets here are semi industrial. But workers need sandwiches, so the sole remaining shop survived.

In front of the woman’s house stood a husky old oak, its bark tough and crusty, its heavy branches spreading high up over the sidewalk. A few blemishes, insect holes like eyes, but they only made it more beautiful.

“Listen,” she said, “Do you think the city would come cut my tree?”

I asked what the problem was.

“The squirrels are dropping those — what are they called?”

“Acorns,” I said. She was not young, this woman.

“Yes, acorns, and they’re dropping them on the roof of the house and making a terrible racket.”

“You want to cut the tree?” I said. “It’s a nice tree.”

“No! Just if they would come trim the branches,” she said. “I would never want them to cut the tree down. It’s 63 years old, I remember because it was planted the year after my son was born.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“You know,” she said, “in the summertime, everyone comes over and we sit under the tree. It’s so nice and cool in the shade.”

We stood on the stained streets of this shabby neighborhood, clogged with trucks, noisy, so changed from when she had her young son 63 years ago. And I thought of Chekhov, and the summer retreats of that time, and the racket of the acorns hitting the roof like the steady chopping sound of cherry trees in the background, off stage where you can’t see them.

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October 12, 2015 · 9:16 pm

Feed the Tree

If you believe in the power of coincidence it won’t surprise you that the song I heard in my car on my way back from apple picking today, by Belly, the ’90s rock band, was Feed the Tree:

So take your hat off

When you’re talking to me

And be there when I feed the tree

I went apple picking in the most incongruous orchard I have ever seen — and I have seen orchards in my time. We lived for a while in a farmhouse in the middle of an old orchard upstate, where we were intoxicated every spring by the ineffable honey of apple blossoms (and the taste of blueberry dacquiries).

“You’ll like it – it’s a little different!” my brother Peter told me when we talked about going picking there. That was an understatement. Edward Gorey might have created Mr. Apples, which is run by a man named Philip Apple in High Falls, at the edge of the Catskills. There were ghost barns.

Mr. Apples had just two things available for purchase: pick your own apples and cider vinegar. His signage covered the place.

The trees themselves were overgrown, twisted and blackened, their leaves gone, and their apples had fallen to the ground in drifts of blemished fruit.

I loved this place, if only because it was so different from the corn maze-smiling scarecrow-fake pumpkin patch orchards you usually find in the Hudson Valley. It was a little hard to get past the produce, though. “There are some black spots,” said Mr. Apples. “When you get home, brush them with a cloth and the spots will come off.”

I can tell you that no amount of rubbing would take the spots off. “Organic style apple” was how he billed his product, and he said the spots were caused by humidity. They looked like they came out of Snow White. I bought half a bushel and will find some use for the poor things, maybe apple sauce.

After Apple Picking is Robert Frost’s fabulous poem about, yes, harvesting apples, but also about human frailty, a woodchuck and death, among other things.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

It is so complex and wonderful that you must take yourself to the Poetry Foundation and read it.

Since I began working as an arborist, the image comes into my head quite often: the tantrumming trees in The Wizard of Oz hurling apples.

The fruit I saw today would be suitable for throwing. And that’s a good thing. Joni Mitchell: Hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT. Give me spots on my apples but leave me with the birds and bees.

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October 5, 2015 · 6:29 pm

Tree Wounds

How do you differentiate between ailing and healing, suffering and facing down adversity? Yesterday I was called in to evaluate the tree of a friend’s neighbor. It was a remarkable specimen.

A mammoth Norway Maple probably 70 feet tall and more than 75 years old, it had grown into the wall behind it and onto the bulging bedrock below it like a barnacle. It looked as if its roots had nothing but rock as a base, no soil. Of course trees the world over grow in stone. Georgia’s Stone Mountain is home to trees for which life would seem improbable.

But this maple had had some carpenter ants around its base, said the neighbor, a genial man who had just moved in with his young family. There was a hand-sized hole that felt damp on the inside. And above our heads, high up the trunk, bulged a just-birthed cream-colored fungus that he felt was suspicious.

To me the tree looked as solid as a brick. It had stood for 75 years, after all. This nice young man wanted me to tell him to take it down, afraid it was going to topple off its rock pedestal onto his house.

What about the wet hole, the fungi? They can indicate biotic problems. The hole can be an entrance for wood-rotting organisms, and sometimes appears watersoaked and has a bad odor ( I didn’t smell it.) The fungi isn’t a sign of peak health either.

Compartmentalization, I told him. Trees have an amazing capacity to heal themselves. They limit the spread of discoloration and decay by erecting walls beneath and above and on either side of the stressor. This is why you see so many otherwise healthy trees with holes in them – they suffered a wound in the past but patched themselves up. Trees are smart.

Something I could aspire to. When I’m jangled, my walls don’t necessarily partition off the wound and the disturbance of mind can spread unchecked.

Today, another tree wound, this one in autumn-mad Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The Sugar Maple stood in its cramped tree pit, surrounded by concrete pourers, gnarly roots braided around its base.

The talk began, on the part of watchful neighbors and some of the crew. This swarthy maple had a fine coating of thick green lichen.

It looked ancient, probably half a century or more of thrusting those gangly branches into the air. But, but… in one of the branches was a sizable hole. Not only one hole, but two connecting ones on either side of the limb so that you could actually see through it if you stood on your tiptoes.

Was it a victim of disease? Would the branch drop and pulverize a car? “This year, for sure,” one old timer said. Or was it a wounded soldier that given some patience would persevere? Could the maple compartmentalize its drastic (but poetic, I thought) wound? How do you predict what will happen? You can’t take down all the trees.

In the city or the suburbs – “the sticks” as my friend’s neighbor called his new environs – when will a wound get better? I wish I could say for sure. Tree, arborist, heal thyself.

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September 27, 2015 · 3:24 pm

The Memorial Birch

I love mementos. A pinkie size painted remembrance of a trip to Florence, a miniature silvered lucky acorn, an AA 3-month recovery coin – these all lurk around my desktop, giving me what I feel is some sort of immunity or talismanic power. Perhaps the oddest memento in the cabin, however, is a chunk of birch that was presented to Gil after both his parents had died.

His sister and her husband contrived this memorial candle holder, and made another one for each of their parents’ progeny. Embedded beneath both beeswax candles are the intermixed ashes of my parents-in-law.

This tree-urn seems magical and eery by turns. Do you light the candles or not? We tried once, I think, but it just seemed too strange.

Also, where do you keep the honorary log? I’m thinking yule log, here, but it’s not going to go in the fireplace, obviously, or on the coffee table, or on the table when we eat dinner. We want the memorial close, but not too close. We’ve come up with a compromise placement, on the porch, where the birch mirrors the logs of the house. The candles have gotten a little dusty, a little cobwebbed out there, but it’s all natural.

People often cast their loved ones’ ashes someplace beautiful, often over water. But it makes sense to me that my my in-laws are buried in wood. They loved forests and were environmentalists before their time. Also, even standard-issue coffins are wood. I’d like to be buried in a pine casket, That is, if I am not wrapped in a shroud and laid in a deep, worm-thick hole. It’s natural to want to become wood, be a part of a tree, because a tree is probably the best part of our world.

I heard in Nature magazine that a team of 38 scientists recently found our planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees, many more than the previous estimate of 400 billion. Shocking. There are 422 trees for every living person. Plenty for wood coffins, and plenty for birch ash-urns.

And plenty too for another mode of burial I recently heard of. In Italy, a pair of designers invented a unique method which actually transforms the body of the deceased into a tree. It’s called the Capsula Mundi Project. The corpus, it is said, changes into nutrients for the tree that allow it to grow healthfully.

You get to pick the kind of tree you want planted above the pod in which you will be encased, in a fetal position. The capsule is completely biodegradable. The outcome is what the inventors are calling a memory forest, an alternative to lines of granite tombstones.

If we had this already, our memorial birch wouldn’t seem quite so lonely.

Something Concrete

Today was the last day working concrete at the site on Morgan Avenue. The mixture of cement, sand, aggregate and other secret-recipe ingredients comes down the chute from the mixer truck as thick sludge, like lumpy chocolate pudding. The men stand in the wood sidewalk frame “floating the concrete” with long flat blades. One worker on his knees wears pads as he smoothes around the edges with a trowel. As they push and pull the floaters, the bumpy material miraculously comes together and regulates itself.

There is not much arborist work today.

All my root preservation is finished, the behemoth roots I found are safely tucked away in plastic under the concrete slabs. I can’t help here in any way, even picking up a leaf from the surface of the poured concrete – that would be an infraction of union rules. All I can do is take note, learn, and monitor.

On the other hand if I leave the leaf there, the contractor will get in trouble with the city. Sidewalks have to be perfect. Or as perfect as anything can be.

Once in a while the contractor himself picks up a floater and sweeps it across the wet concrete to settle it. Then the workers score the squares, measuring with a floss of a string and employing another long-handled tool. These scorings I think are not necessary in any practical sense but only aesthetic.

“Art always opts for the individual, the concrete,” said Jorge Luis Borges. “Art is not platonic.” But sometimes concrete is simply concrete.

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September 24, 2015 · 5:40 pm

LinkedIn and Out

Once upon a time I had a job. It was actually a sequence of jobs – as a women’s magazine editorial assistant, then as a writer/researcher for an arts impresario, then an editorial director for a not-for-profit that advanced women’s careers. I was in my 20s. Working as the assistant to the health and horoscopes editor at Family Circle was pretty entertaining.

When I left the editorial life to become an author, though, I felt elated.

Years later, when I decided to take a hiatus from writing books, I hooked up with a career coach at my alma mater. What can I do? I asked her. I needed to work. I used to go into Manhattan once in a while to meet with her, and she would tell me that I hadn’t failed at my chosen metier, that I simply had to switch from one field to a related one using my fine-turned authorial skills. When she said switch, she would hold her hands in front of her and raise and move them to the side as though she were lifting something light to a place it better belonged .

How does someone who has written books for 25 years switch from one field to a related one? Reenter a work force where everyone is a teenager and has the computer skills of a genie and the moxie of a shark? I subscribed to adverts on Indeed.com. I sleuthed around cultural nonprofits to find a fit. Try and try, I couldn’t shake the fact that I was essentially a book author. I had speaking skills though, and I liked being outdoors, so I applied to work the sea lion exhibit at the Central Park Zoo. No deal.

The thing my career coach advocated most vehemently was that I get involved with LinkedIn, a site that I’d always regarded with bafflement. What was it for, anyway? Why did everyone want to connect with me all the time? Now I prettied up a resume to sound cheerful and proficient and started cold calling LinkedIn contacts. I felt like I was plastered with one of those dorky tags people wear at conventions.

I got some interviews. During one, after swallowing a cold pill, I got such bad cotton mouth that I had to excuse myself to go find a water fountain. Didn’t get the job. I didn’t get the job as writing center director, writing teacher, social media content writer. Everyone knows that sending c.v.’s is not how you get a job. So I returned again to LinkedIn. Would the director of the Intrepid Museum, the contact of a contact, have any ideas about how I could find work? No? So sorry.

Then it dawned on me. I didn’t want a deskbound, social media-obsessed editorial 9-5 any more than companies wanted a silver-haired overqualified author who spent a lot of time inside her head. I contacted the owner of a small company that had something to do with trees.

Trees. That was novel. Those leafy giants that swayed along the highway? When I was a kid, I remembered, I used to build houses out of acorn tops and pebbles in the hollow of a tree in my yard. Trees, it occurred to me, were magic. I would move from one end of the supply chain to another, from bound paper books, which ate up trees, to the living air-cleansing shade-providing originators themselves. The raw material of all literature. All I had to do was take a test, and then I would be sprung from my writing coop, out in the air, in Brooklyn, saving trees and watching the trucks go by.

Elated.

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September 21, 2015 · 5:21 pm

The Sidewalks of New York

What lies under the city sidewalk? Dirt. Sand. Rocks, bricks, miscellaneous debris. Skeletal remains of vermin. And thousands of miles of pipes.

And roots.

I found one today on the job, a gnarled and grizzled specimen, a time capsule from before the jungle of New York was so concrete. This London Plane root, a yard long and six inches at its fattest, had been severed by the backhoe as it excavated the old concrete sidewalk. It was still wet with life.

It made me think of those anguished lines by Neruda, in Walking Around:

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,

insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,

going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,

taking in and thinking, eating every day.

In a way, the metaphor is truer than the reality. We’re a lot more insecure than that root I found today, chopped through though it was by the backhoe.

I don’t know how they poured concrete a hundred years back, in the 1890’s, when the pop song “The Sidewalks of New York” was Taylor-Swift hot. Then the streets were mainly cobbles, Belgian paving blocks. Asphalt was relatively new. Some streets were still dirt, more country lane than city slicker. It must have been fantastic for a woman to sweep down a (relatively) clean sidewalk without befouling the hem of her skirts. Especially if she was responsible for cleaning those skirts.

Now a root in the city seems fantastic. On my first job going among the trees, in June, there was a foreman with a sticker on his hard hat that read Irish. His name was Sean, and he had a salt-and-pepper mustache and a twinkle in his eye. I had been tracing the progress of an excavation to install a new gas line, watching the roots as they materialized in the “moist guts of the earth.” Making sure they weren’t broken by the backhoe. I had to leave, and I asked Sean to keep an eye on a certain root I was concerned about. He smiled, with only a hint of irony.

“Ah,” said Sean, “the lovely root.”

The Pits

My job today was seeing after the health and happiness of two trees in new pits, #39 and #40 on the site survey, which were having their environs disturbed by the installation of a brand new sidewalk. It’s a discrete job. Somebody has to tell the foreman the dimensions of the new pits (82″ across, back to the playground seam). Someone, in this case, who isn’t a man. One of the things I do as the men around me install curbs, pour sidewalks, do all the lifting, the hauling, the digging: I give life to the new pits.

“It’s a man’s world,” sang James Brown in his rip-your-throat-out song, “but it ain’t nothing without a woman or a girl.” To these men on this construction site, I am mainly a fly on the wall (and I’d get a little more attention if I were a little more fly). Mainly the workers are, as my boss/friend promised when I started, “respectful.” They are, with an edge. There still exist Neanderthals in the concrete jungle — like the foreman who smiled viciously in my face when I came with a question, saying, “Yes, now, what do you want?”

No one asks me to get them coffee. They pretty much leave me alone, without that vicious smile or even a scowl. But what I do is extraneous to the main purpose of this world. The men work like dogs. Bad metaphor, they work much harder than any dog ever did. Sometimes I feel I’m here only as an audience for their macho performance. I am actually here because New York City requires that an arborist be present on construction sites that have trees. When arborists weren’t on sites, back in the seventies, there was a tree holocaust.

“They also serve that only stand and wait,” wrote Milton. I am waiting for the concrete to surround the new pits, which are supposed to provide a pristine environment for these London Plane trees to thrive, but are now full of fast food wrappers, used condoms and dog shit. “New York City is hard,” a worker originally from Togo told me. “You need to have the trees.” When Khruschev visited the city, he said, “I don’t like the life here in New York. There is no greenery. It would make a stone sick.” Construction workers with their backhoes and cement mixers vs. tree people with their 82″ squares of dirt might be a case of mine is bigger than yours. On the other hand, I feel, all these 40′ spreading Plane trees here are mine. It’s just simpler for everyone if I’m invisible. That’s easy because I’m not the girlfriend or wife but the same age as the silver-haired owner of this construction business.

James Brown: “He’s lost in the wilderness, he’s lost…”

Think I’ll go stand under the serviceberry tree down the block.

Its star shaped blossoms come out first of all the trees in spring, soon after the ground has thawed, when people in olden times had their first burial services after the long winter. I’m going to hang out under the serviceberry and see if I can serve somebody (thank you Mr. Dylan).

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I saved a tree on this industrial stretch of Williamsburg-neighboring Brooklyn today. Or at least I saved a root.

I was on a job at the city-owned Cooper Park Houses, constructed in 1953, which means that the London Plane trees circling the housing project had had plenty of time to grow stately and plump, even if they weren’t grown in a wilderness. These are their siblings in Central Park, the beauties with camouflage patterned bark.

The work day was almost over. When the crew dug up sidewalks in order to install new concrete, my role was to see that all at the border of tree and pavement was well. So far, uneventful. Then the engineers yelled for me, madly gesticulating. And there it was.

A long, red-brown root, encased in fill like an otter swimming through grit. I saw the Plantanus x Acerfolia it was attached to, waving its leafy limbs in a gust of wind. I made sure the workers at the site left the root intact. Preserving it was the only really important thing I did all day. But it was enough.

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Filed under Arborist, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography, Trees

August 10, 2014 · 10:18 am

Slowdown Saturday

A knuckle-sized frog hopped straight by the woodpile.

A butterfly lit on a thistle.

Chickadees flocked around the bird feeder, making off with safflower seeds.

A long day, reading a long novel.

Excitement: Oliver thundering from the porch toward the rabbit he’ll never catch.

It grew cool, deep shadows stretched across the grass.

Then there were dinner pancakes, made with fresh-laid eggs from the good neighbor’s coop and local blueberries, soaked in a friend’s home-tapped maple syrup.

“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon,” said Henry James. “To me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

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Filed under Cooking, Culture, Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writers, Writing

Category Archives: Nature

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