Last weekend, we went over the plant nursery to pick out a replacement for the pin oak felled in the hurricane.
Plant nurseries are visually delicious places; I feel as a cook might when walking into Sahadi's or Fairway or the farmer's market, sizing up the ingredients, deciding how to combine them. But that day I tried to limit myself to just one objective: the choice of a tree to buy for my parents. Of course, we might have purchased another pin oak, but why replace something so drab and utilitarian? My plantsman friend, Ted, who is liable to say things like "right as rain" (and who's predicting a heavy drought this summer) suggested a couple of trees: the tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica, also known as black gum - not to be confused with that plague of trees, the sweetgum) and the white swamp oak. I was thrilled when he also suggested copper beeches, which I've long loved. It's not just their beauty - the graceful, cumulus canopy, the shimmery dark color of the leaves, the doughy white bark - but their hardiness that makes them so valuable. As Ted pointed out, you can drive all over our county, and everywhere you will see the stumps of lost trees and amputated limbs, but the copper beeches seem to have survived the hurricane unscathed. They are the expensive couture to the fast fashion of Callery pears: you invest in a beech, knowing it won't ever be yours (as the ad campaign has it). Beeches are legacy trees, and we don't anymore live in a society that is much worried about the long-term, so they're not often planted.
We chose this guy:
"It's my last donation," laughed my mother, and it's true. It's a donation to future owners, to the neighborhood. My parents won't be in the house to see it mature; if I bring back my grandchildren to show them where I grew up, the tree will be a substantial size, though not halfway through its lifespan.
II.
It's now full-on spring. Yesterday, the dog sat next to me as I wrote in the sun, his tongue tap-tap-tapping with each pant. In the morning, as I walked him down a nearby road that juts between two rivers, I noticed all the dead trees, all the more obvious since winter's end. This street suffered heavily in the hurricane; the rivers' brackish water rose and converged on houses and street. A friend's parents had sheltered in their home - which, given its elevation and its age (easily a hundred and twenty years), they figured had outlasted quite a few storms; but the night of the hurricane, he said, they feared that it would be swept from its foundations by the wind and water. Oaks and maples and flowering trees dropped limbs or were torn from the sodden ground by their own weight. Now, five months months later, nearly all the evergreens on the street - pines, spruces, cedars, boxwood, cherry laurels, even the hardy hollies - have turned rust-brown and died. But yesterday, at the end of the street - in an area where most houses have been condemned, where the water rose so high and so strong that it ripped the rooms from buildings and twisted wooden docks into roller coasters - I walked past a copper beech, serenely beautiful, just beginning to leaf out in the spring.
III.
Two Saturdays ago, I pruned my mother's rosebushes. I hadn't done them last year, and maybe not even the year before, since I would have been in Berlin. Now is about as late as you'd want to prune them, when the red foliage grows in tufts along the stems. When, in college, I volunteered in a public garden, I sometimes was assigned to work in the rose circle under the guidance of a slight, trim woman in her early fifties who had a yard too shady to grow roses. So she came to volunteer, two or three times a week during the growing season. When you cut the branches, she told me, generally aim to go down no lower than a third of each stem; at the same time, you will want to remove anything diseased or dead, or those suckers that creep up from underneath the knob of the plant. It's good to bring some glue along to dab on the edges of the diseased branches or the suckers, to seal them off to disease. You may also want to prune to keep from too many branches crossing over the interiors. (I always make a hash of this and wind up with mangled plants.) And, I was told, with your sharp pruning shears, slice away each branch at an angle.
If this sounds like a lot of work, it is - and people, I've not even warned you to wear rough denim or canvas shirts and pants and gloves. (I never do, and so my hands look like I've fought with cats, and I spent subsequent days wincingly squeezing the embedded thorns from all the tenderest bits of my fingers.)
At the gardens, the roses were known to go from closed-bud to past-their-peak within just one muggy Carolina summer day. The gardeners sprayed the hell out of them, as I recall; this may have changed in the past ten years, but at the time, toxic chemicals were needed to stave off the blackspot and mold that otherwise causes all the leaves to fall off, reducing the rosebush to soggy blooms on long stalks. Personally, I've long since moved away from hybrid teas, overbred and too dainty for their own good, and often fragrance-less to boot. But I suppose that even I am liable to be seduced by roses, at least in certain guises: if not a garden full of roses, or long-stemmed roses in a vase, at least the tumbling abundance of 'The Fairy' or 'New Dawn,' promiscuous in bloom though blushing in color. Roses have become so overlayed with symbolism that it is hard to see the flower in front of you, but they form a fairly motley crowd, like a house full of far-flung relatives (and equally prickly): everything from the haughty hybrid teas to Rosa rugosa, which, with a minimum of care, scrambles over sand dunes.
Closer to the beginning of my gardening career, I planted roses at my mother's house - first, 'Mr. Lincoln,' which has been dug up and moved several times but is still serviceable. When I was about eighteen or twenty, we put in a boxwood rose parterre on the side of the house. The boxwood are all gone, now, moved elsewhere, but the roses remain, woody and misshapen, evidence of my earlier taste and my errors.
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