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California redwoods

Cedars of Lebanon

Wendell Berry

I recently read a newspaper story about the landscaping "problem" that faces people who build enormous homes in Midwestern suburbs. As the article explained, most subdivisions are built on farmland without many shade trees to begin with. To make matters worse, a standard 8-foot sapling looks like a leafy broomstick when planted next to a 5,000-square-foot, faux-colonial mansion.

The obvious solution — at least for moneyed homeowners — is to plant bigger trees, and landscapers and nursery owners are happy to oblige. By using a truck-mounted hydraulic spade, a landscape crew can transplant a mature tree up to 40-feet tall. Although trees this size can easily cost $5,000 apiece, the nursery owners quoted in the article said they’re struggling to keep up with the demand. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, the rich are different from you and me — they don’t have to wait for their trees to grow.

My wife and I own an old farmhouse in the country that’s surrounded by fields of clover, corn, soybeans and watermelons. We, too, would like some more shade around our property. Yet there’s also a wheezy pump in the basement that needs fixing, and thanks to our anemic furnace the upstairs doesn’t get much warmer than 55 degrees on a cold winter day. We know where our money’s going for the next five years, and it won’t be to line a landscaper’s pocket.

So partly out of economic necessity, and partly out of principle, I’m going to grow my own trees from scratch. I’ve decided to do it the way God grew the redwoods of California, the cedars of Lebanon and the teaks of the Indonesia rain forest. In other words, from acorns, from nuts, from pinecones, from seedpods, from the seedlings that whirl off the branches of sugar maples in the summertime like squadrons of little green helicopters.

This do-it-yourself approach is refreshingly simple. Beyond that, there’s a perverse logic here that I find appealing: If you can’t afford to have the biggest trees, why not have the smallest? Instead of trying to outspend your neighbor on landscaping, why not grow trees for next to nothing with seeds collected from wild, and thereby free, sources?

My career in microforestry began on a bright October day as my wife and I walked the dog down our country road. During one of the dog’s endless pit stops, I gathered a half-dozen hickory nuts and dropped them in the pocket of my Army field jacket. In typical fashion, I forgot about the nuts once we returned home and didn’t wear the coat again until five months later. After rediscovering the nuts in March, I planted them in 1-quart milk cartons — filled with soil from my garden — and sat them on a sunny windowsill.

Later, I learned that my customary procrastination was in this case provident. To become fertile, wild seeds require a season of dormancy, and the dark, cool closet was an ideal place for hibernation. By spring, the nuts were rested and ready. And by late May, four of the six had thrust a toothpick-sized shoot toward the heavens. For me, and no doubt for the tiny trees, it was an alleluia moment — a simple miracle wrought from the most elemental ingredients: water, soil, sunlight.

This year, at the risk of complicating my new hobby, I enlarged my indoor forest. It now sits on a 3-foot shelf that I built beneath two east-facing windows in an unheated storeroom. There, in little cardboard containers, I planted seeds from hickory, burr oak, white oak, redbud, honey locust, apple and sycamores. I chose their parentage carefully. In the way of traditional farmers the world over, I selected my seed stock from the strongest, healthiest specimens I could find. After two years, I'll replant the seedlings outside or give them away as birthday and Christmas presents.

Raising trees from scratch is an inexpensive hobby, and filling cartons with soil and seed is a relaxing way to pass an evening. As hobbies go, microforestry doesn't require special equipment, clothing, instruction or user's fees. In modern America, however, I've found that such a pastime will sooner or later mark you as a suspicious character.

On a Sunday afternoon last fall, I went to gather acorns from an ancient burr oak along U.S. 131, a busy four-lane highway in Saint Joseph County, Michigan. I've long admired this magnificent tree, which evokes for me the gnarled wisdom and splendor of an Old Testament prophet. Given its size, the tree must have borne witness to Indian hunting parties, pioneer wagons and the boundless flocks of passenger pigeons that once darkened the Michigan sky. I entertained myself with these thoughts as I filled a paper sack with acorns and was so happily absorbed that I never saw the bright blue sedan pull up.

"Excuse me sir, can I ask what you're doing?" the state trooper asked.

"Well, uh, I'm gathering acorns," I said. "I'm going to plant them and grow my own trees."

He looked at me with a mixture of bemusement and pity. Somewhat flustered, I rambled on about the beautiful burr oak, and how saving its acorns would allow me to propagate its progeny.

"You know," he said, looking past my shoulder as cars and trucks zipped by, "I drive by that tree every day, but I guess I'm just too busy to notice that kind of thing." He told me to be careful around traffic, which probably seemed like a necessary precaution when you're dealing with a 40-year-old man who gets excited about collecting acorns.

The contraband acorns are safe at home now, tucked in a bed of black potting soil. When they become seedlings, they'll join the 150 larger trees that I've transplanted to build a double-row windbreak around our four acres. These larger trees I've collected from fields, forests, back yards and vacant suburban lots that were about to be scraped clean by bulldozers. I'll fill the gaps in the windbreak with seedlings from the windowsill greenhouse. It's my latest tactic in the small-scale reforestation campaign that began when we bought our house five years ago.

If you're a tiny tree, this is where the story turns dramatic, or, as is often the case, traumatic. Getting seeds to sprout in the sanctuary of a windowsill is a hobby. Helping naked, defenseless seedlings survive in a wild environment is more of a vocation. Like any true vocation, it redirects your life in ways you never expected.

During the first spring in our new home I bought a batch of seedlings from the county forester -- tulip poplar, white oak, red oak and butternut. They came in a bouquet-sized bundle, wrapped in brown paper and bailing twine, their roots packed in damp peat moss. It seemed so easy then. Dig a hole every 15 feet, plop in a seedling, add some water and wait.

Of the 100 seedlings I planted that April, only five were alive by the next spring. After several of the more robust seedlings leafed out in May, a late frost turned their tender growth into wilted blobs of chlorophyll. Then came a month-long summer drought that claimed dozens more seedlings while we were away on vacation. In October, a band of rambunctious deer scraped their antlers on my largest saplings until the bark hung in splintery tatters. And in winter, when all seemed peaceful beneath a white robe of snow, rabbits and field mice killed even more trees by gnawing off the bark around the trunk, as clean as if you'd whittled it bare with a jack knife.

I have a bookshelf full of tree guides and always ask nurserymen and landscapers for additional tips on tree survival. The experts rarely have direct answers to my specific questions. My trees follow their own interpretations of natural law, and it's my job to figure them out. But this I do know: Any tree that survives until maturity in the wild is a statistical oddity -- no wonder the ancient druids considered them divine. The energy, luck and grace required for a bare acorn to become a thick-trunked oak in the face of animal predation, insects, disease, lightning, drought -- and these days, chainsaw-wielding county road crews -- borders on the miraculous. If you want proof, go plant 100 seedlings on the weedy, dusty margins of a Michigan cornfield.

Yet beyond this hard-earned practical knowledge, I've discovered something else. After nearly two decades of single life, after shuttling my possessions and relationships between a half-dozen cracker-box apartments, I've found that trees can lead you home. Or at least, their honest promises can strengthen the fragile bonds between a new family and its home-to-be.

From the beginning, I was taken with the simple beauty of our 19^th_century brick farmhouse, with its traditional 12-pane windows and clean, vertical lines. And I was well aware that the house required considerable modernization - "a diamond in the rough," the building inspector optimistically called it.

However, after my wife and I moved in, what the house required soon overwhelmed me. It confounded my meager mechanical abilities and mocked my naïve assumption that if I followed my heart, the money for a front porch, restored barn and new family room would somehow follow. How had I made such a foolish decision? Most people who buy old houses love to fix them up and have a knack for doing so. Or, they're rich enough to hire a Bob Vila-caliber restoration crew. I can do neither. I'm baffled by miter boxes and carpenter squares, and have never built so much as a birdhouse.

So I lived uneasily in the house those first years, drawn instead to the unthreatening emptiness of the old field behind the barn. Out in the tall grass I did what I could do -- dug, planted and watered until, gradually, the living things took hold.

Slowly, the house and I began to make a separate peace. Here, too, I learned to do what I could, mainly grunt work. I tore out lathe and plaster walls, ripped off a leaky tin roof, painted and glazed the 125-year-old windows (of which there are 27). As for remodeling projects, I befriended a family of affable and affordable Amish carpenters. Their skill and good company has left its own mark on our home and we're making steady progress on the renovation.

Even so, when the expense and anxiety of it all tempts me to buy a maintenance-free, three-bedroom ranch house, my hunger for homegrown apples and chestnuts still convinces me otherwise. I've clearly invested more of myself in the trees than I have in any mortgage.

Beyond rooting me to this place, the trees have taught me to regard middle age with something other than biblical fear and trembling. It all began quite unconsciously. When I see a seedling or sapling, I often find myself wishing away the years and decades. When I look at a chest-high white pine, I can imagine my daughter someday nestled there with her dolls and blankets for an afternoon tea party. In my mind's eye, I can see where today's 5-foot red oak will touch the sky in 2030.

Looking that far ahead also prompts some less sanguine questions. In 2030, God willing, I'll be 71 years old. My trees will have attained the full vigor of adolescence -- a healthy white oak can live three centuries -- yet what will my own limbs and trunk look like? I think, too, of this property, now an island amid a small sea of farmland. Even if I protect our four-acre refuge, what's to stop new houses from pressing in on every side? How will we preserve our dark and restful evenings against the noise and glare of suburbia?

Last week, in a farm field near my home, I watched a farmer tear out a quarter-mile hedgerow of hardwoods. In an afternoon, he pushed down more trees than I will plant and nurture in a lifetime. In the face of such destruction, my homemade nursery and windowsill greenhouse seems childishly futile. Or rather, the scale at which I'm doing it seems futile. How can flimsy cardboard cartons withstand the steel-toothed malevolence of a bulldozer?

We all know the cynical, pragmatic answer to that. At the same time, one of the biggest mistakes you can make when planting trees is to think small. Your oak seedlings may look lonely when stuck in the ground at 15-foot intervals, but without ample room, they'll never have the sunlight and nutrients to fully develop. Only through experience and the eyes of faith can we perceive their true potential for growth.

Neither, then, should we limit ourselves to a stunted vision of what our semi-wild places, cities and suburbs can be. As Wendell Berry says, "No life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves."

So if you've got enough money to buy a few $5,000 trees, by all means do so. The world needs all the shade and birdsong it can get, even when it's confined to the putting-green splendor of a gated neighborhood. For all of us, whether we're a have or a have-not, there is good reason to hope. For God's mercy is not strained -- it falls to the earth as an acorn and will reach for heaven in the sunshine of even a poor man's windowsill.

Tom Springer is staff writer and editor at the Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan.

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