Trees that heal

We inherited pear and apricot trees when we moved to 15 Marlowe Drive. I was five years old when we began making our home there. As the years went on, our basement shelves were increasingly populated by jars of pear sauce and apricot preserves.

The other tree in the backyard was a catalpa, a towering, sprawling deciduous. In the spring, it would rain down pollen-filled flowers on our patio, and in the fall, odd bean-pole-shaped seed pods. You don’t need to be a tree expert to sense that this non-native doesn’t belong here.

But it provided shade for the patio, a perfect crevice for a tree fort, and thick fodder for the imagination of us children. Beans falling from the sky? What endless stories we could tell!

Nurturer of trees

My mother was a lay arboriculturist, you might say. She took a few courses in tree identification at the local community college one year, just for the love of it. That was when she started to point at trees and tell me their names when we were on walks, like introducing me to her friends.

She planted several trees around our property, including a gorgeous serviceberry right out our front steps that flowered angelically every spring. I don’t remember this, but my siblings tell me she started an oak tree from seed, just on our kitchen sill, like it was second nature. Doing the laundry, washing the dishes, sweeping the floors, growing an oak tree from seed. It towers over the house at 15 Marlowe today.

I know that because I visited recently. The people who live there now are strangers, but a few weeks ago I was compelled to drive up there, park on the side of the road, and stare. There was the oak tree my mother nurtured. There, in the back, the catalpa, pear and apricot. What was missing was the serviceberry out front. Someone must have cut it down.

Ecological grief

I planted a serviceberry outside the front steps of my home a few years ago. Actually, the city did it for me. Hamilton has a tree-planting program, and I phoned early one spring to ask for one. I didn’t hear back for a while. I went on vacation, and came back to a 10-foot tree in my front yard. Bureaucratic communication failure, perhaps, but a win in every other sense. The birds in my neighbourhood loved it even more than I did.

We lived in a tree-deficient neighbourhood, with less than 15 percent tree cover. Environment Canada recommends at least 30 percent. I could feel the absence of the trees when I lived there; I’m still not sure how exactly to name what I felt. Was I overthinking it? Or was it truly some kind of bodily ailment, proving true the research done that suggests lack of tree exposure can contribute to heart disease, hypertension, lung disease and immune dysfunction? Or was it grief? Like the loss of the friends my mother had introduced me to?

Whatever the case, I planted the serviceberry out front, and a tulip tree in the backyard. I knew I couldn’t live with a tree deficit forever. I just needed to wait five to ten years, but tree cover was on its way.

The tulip tree had just grown a few inches taller than me when we got the news. Our landlords were selling. We would probably need to move.

The promised tree

Of course, no home is ever a forever home on this earth at the best of times, let alone in a housing crisis like the one we’re experiencing in Ontario. The apostle John describes what our forever home will look like when the Final Day comes: rivers winding through golden streets, the sun shining down on the people, and at the heart of the city, a tree.

This tree is multi-grafted, producing twelve kinds of fruit. And the grafter was clever enough to include graftings with fruit that produce at all different seasons because John writes that the tree produces fruit twelve times a year. A never-ending harvest. And this towering tree, sprawling its branches to provide cover across the city, serves as medicine to heal the nations. No more tree cover deficiency. No more non-native invasives. No more grief or loss or tears.

Loving the home we have

By the grace of God and the luck of socio-economic privilege, we found a place to move. The morning after our first night in our new home, I woke up and saw a maple waving to me out the south-facing window. To the west, a willow was dancing.

Be under no illusion, we are not living in the New Jerusalem. The maple that waves to me is a Manitoba maple, an invasive that’s wreaked havoc ever since we moved in. Branches that sprawl far wider than they ought fall onto our roof, causing no serious damage so far, thankfully. But this bully of a tree shades out native plants and hogs all the soil nutrients.

This is all we got, though, isn’t it? The only earth we have to love is bruised and beaten. The tree we will raise our family under is invasive. The gardens we plant will always be in exile. The houses we build will forever be bought and sold.

But if we squint at sunrise, we may at moments see the streets light up with gold. If we plant pear and apricot trees, we may get just one twelfth of the harvest of the tree of life, still an abundant return. We live in the hope of the city to come, the city with the tree that heals nations.

I look out the window at my new tree companions, and I picture my mother, may she be resting in peace, also in her New Home, walking down those golden streets, nourished by the tree with the never-ending harvest. I hope she has a serviceberry out front.