Trees are the ultimate homebodies. And with age, they become even more obdurate in their stability. Season after season, their spidery, snaky roots auger ever deeper into the dark womb of the earth. Hardwood trees, like oaks and hickories, sink vertical tap roots that often extend as far underground as the tree is tall.
That makes them about as unwilling and difficult to move as a 35-year-old video gamer who still lives in his parent's basement.
You can imagine, then, how aghast the little clump of innocent saplings must've been when I assailed them last Saturday with a rusty shovel. Especially on this quiet fall day, when their bare limbs and branches had already gone to sleep for the winter.
The specimens at hand were sugar maples, all in the 3-5 foot range, still easy to move by hand without serious injury. They were clustered like woody weeds under the hulking trunks of an Osage orange hedge across from my brother's house. The prevailing west wind had born them there as tender green seedpods, and in anchorite fashion, they'd taken up permanent residence.
It's been unusually dry this fall and once I dug past the leaf litter and meager humus, the soil was baked hard as clay pottery. I scraped, chipped and finally dug with my fingers to pry little musket ball clods away from the white, veiny roots. Then with hand pruners, I snipped off the long, rubbery laterals and wrenched the trees loose from the brown sugar-like subsoil.
By dusk, they'd all been transplanted to a new fencerow that will help shelter our beehives from the north wind. The saplings' spindly shanks made them seem painfully exposed, what with the 15 feet of elbow room on either side and the 1/2 acre of open sky overhead. But a few scoops of composted goat manure, several five-gallon pails of water, and a six-inch blanket of straw for mulch (purloined from the dog's pen) helped to finish the job rightly.
Or at least that's my side of the story. What I saw were some sorry, stunted trees that could better reach their potential on my property. Any homo sapiens with an opposing thumb and a factory-made shovel can win that argument.
Yet for their part, the trees also deserve some consideration if not contemplation.
In a world duped by the suicidal promise of endless economic growth, it's easy to project onto nature the equally flawed notion that all creatures must perform at peak market value to justify their existence. In truth, it's never just the strong who survive and bring good to the world. Even in their former location, the diminished little trees rendered some valid ecological benefits. And if nothing else, you've got to admire their stoic character. Even dwarfed and starved for sunlight they stood and served. In nature's economy, the meek can still find full employment.
As fresh transplants, my foster saplings are no doubt aware of their new surroundings. (Although at first it may feel more like a rude exile than relocation opportunity.) Trees may not be sentient beings, but there's a whole lot of applied science at work in their woody craniums.
How so? Well, they've got renewable, expandable skin (bark), and sap that can miraculously turn into antifreeze for the winter. They can antiseptically heal heal themselves from the wounds of fire, hail, insects and windstorms. They can, through daily feats of vegetative calculation, dispatch new roots to the surface in rainy weather, and plunge them deep to tap subterrranean moisture in times of drought.
Much more astutely than I, the sightless trees will come to see their new home for exactly what it is. With weekly watering in spring and summer, I'll do my part to ease their transition. But my benign interventions will guarantee nothing. Each tree must find its own answers, must live out its own adaptations and compromises with the local world. Anyone who's rooted, or wants to be, can surely understand that.
That makes them about as unwilling and difficult to move as a 35-year-old video gamer who still lives in his parent's basement.
You can imagine, then, how aghast the little clump of innocent saplings must've been when I assailed them last Saturday with a rusty shovel. Especially on this quiet fall day, when their bare limbs and branches had already gone to sleep for the winter.
The specimens at hand were sugar maples, all in the 3-5 foot range, still easy to move by hand without serious injury. They were clustered like woody weeds under the hulking trunks of an Osage orange hedge across from my brother's house. The prevailing west wind had born them there as tender green seedpods, and in anchorite fashion, they'd taken up permanent residence.
It's been unusually dry this fall and once I dug past the leaf litter and meager humus, the soil was baked hard as clay pottery. I scraped, chipped and finally dug with my fingers to pry little musket ball clods away from the white, veiny roots. Then with hand pruners, I snipped off the long, rubbery laterals and wrenched the trees loose from the brown sugar-like subsoil.
By dusk, they'd all been transplanted to a new fencerow that will help shelter our beehives from the north wind. The saplings' spindly shanks made them seem painfully exposed, what with the 15 feet of elbow room on either side and the 1/2 acre of open sky overhead. But a few scoops of composted goat manure, several five-gallon pails of water, and a six-inch blanket of straw for mulch (purloined from the dog's pen) helped to finish the job rightly.
Or at least that's my side of the story. What I saw were some sorry, stunted trees that could better reach their potential on my property. Any homo sapiens with an opposing thumb and a factory-made shovel can win that argument.
Yet for their part, the trees also deserve some consideration if not contemplation.
In a world duped by the suicidal promise of endless economic growth, it's easy to project onto nature the equally flawed notion that all creatures must perform at peak market value to justify their existence. In truth, it's never just the strong who survive and bring good to the world. Even in their former location, the diminished little trees rendered some valid ecological benefits. And if nothing else, you've got to admire their stoic character. Even dwarfed and starved for sunlight they stood and served. In nature's economy, the meek can still find full employment.
As fresh transplants, my foster saplings are no doubt aware of their new surroundings. (Although at first it may feel more like a rude exile than relocation opportunity.) Trees may not be sentient beings, but there's a whole lot of applied science at work in their woody craniums.
How so? Well, they've got renewable, expandable skin (bark), and sap that can miraculously turn into antifreeze for the winter. They can antiseptically heal heal themselves from the wounds of fire, hail, insects and windstorms. They can, through daily feats of vegetative calculation, dispatch new roots to the surface in rainy weather, and plunge them deep to tap subterrranean moisture in times of drought.
Much more astutely than I, the sightless trees will come to see their new home for exactly what it is. With weekly watering in spring and summer, I'll do my part to ease their transition. But my benign interventions will guarantee nothing. Each tree must find its own answers, must live out its own adaptations and compromises with the local world. Anyone who's rooted, or wants to be, can surely understand that.
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