When I was born on Long Island in the 1960s, my dad planted a tree in our front yard. We moved when I was 7 and again when I was 12 because of my dad’s jobs and I was pretty tortured by us leaving that tree and those moves. It was literally the only thing left to remind me of my time as young kid, and it was a distant memory. I remember so clearly the night before our second move, super pissed at my dad, facing another uprooting, that I would NEVER move my kids and subject them to the pain he was putting me through.
Advance 20 years. My first child is born and I have an image of me, crazed by sleep deprivation, planting a royal star magnolia at our first house for my March-born daughter just days after she was born. Two years later, a kousa dogwood for my April-born son. Five years after that - a coral bark maple for my January born son. All promising to blossom around their birthdays.
So, I half lied to my 12 year old self twice. We did move from our first house, but just a mile away. And damn if I didn’t didn’t dig up two of the trees and bring them with us (the magnolia being too big at that point, replaced by a new one). We moved 10 years after that, 1/4 mile from the first house and I uprooted all three trees by hand and moved them…the last one as the moving truck was filling house #3 with the stuff from house #2.
My kids take three trees for granted now. I don’t.
What a beautiful testament. We planted SO MANY trees at my parents’ house in Washington, and I know (eventually?) they will leave that house and the property will pass on to someone else. I like to think I won’t be totally heartbroken, but I promise nothing! At this point, some are 50 feet tall, so I can’t even contemplate moving them. BUT I do sometimes want to sneak a prune in on their fruit trees, which they have let assume a feral configuration.
We moved into this house in 1985. I chose it because it had appeared to me in a dream, so I never even looked in the back yard. When I did, I discovered a huge avocado tree. I name things and somewhere along the line, that tree became Ambrose. I have no idea why. Things, like my characters, name themselves and tell me who they are. I fought this for years believing I was abnormal since I wasn't trained as a writer and survived my first fifty years as a dissociative with twelve selves. Even now at 72, my therapist will tell me, "That's normal, Fran, for everyone," because I still don't understand how most people work. Then I read an interview with Alice Walker who talked about how her characters would arrive and take over, and in another interview, I watched Toni Morrison explain that she never meant to write about slavery, but the characters showed up and refused to leave so the world now has Beloved. Seeing them, and James Baldwin, as spiritual mentors, I stopped fighting and began enjoying the appearance of characters like ghosts that speak from the hundreds of rooms in my mind.
Ambrose has rarely been pruned. Long ago, a man who came to replace my garage door stopped and stared up at Ambrose in awe. He said, "I grew up on an avocado farm, and that is the biggest avocado tree I've ever seen!" He's the one who told me Ambrose only bore one avocado, if any because, back in the day, you needed a male and female avocado tree near each other for pollination. There's only one other avocado tree in the neighborhood, April, who bears the most delicious Haas avocados I've ever eaten. She's even bigger than Ambrose but the garage door guy didn't see her. Ambrose's lone avocados, bitten once and dropped by squirrels, is a smooth-skinned variety with watery fruit compared to a Haas. I have no idea what kind it is, but he and April are apparently not compatible.
A year after we moved here, my ex embarked on an affair, and my 12-year marriage was suddenly over. Ambrose became more than a wonderful, shady companion. He held me up over and over as I sobbed with my arms around his rough trunk or laid my hand against him for comfort. He's survived years of California drought during which he still grows beautiful, soft red leaves in the Spring that slowly change into dark green fans that wave in the hot Santa Ana winds when the desert is cooler than the city. He also grows clusters of tiny flowers that are rarely pollinated because there is no companion tree. I talk to Ambrose every day, sometimes thanking him for his steadfast modeling of survival that has kept me from leaving Earth too early. He's shown me how to send my depression deep into the Earth like his roots and raise my face to the sun, like his leaves. I'm still here because he's still here.
I worry, now, that I'll have to move into some insipid thing called "Senior Living," and leave Ambrose behind. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power discovered him and recently pruned him away from the precious phone lines for only the fourth time since I've known him. They did a terrible job because they cared for the lines, not him, but I don't worry because he always grows back, faster for the pruning.
If I have a choice, and no one can say that I don't, I want my spirit to pass into Ambrose when I die. I'll add my strength to his and together we'll withstand anything climate change throws at us as we spread shade over new generations of Angelenos.
If you every want to do a renovation/expansion on your house, and really want to close the circle, Gyo Obata's son is now a partner of a small residential architecture firm doing very nice delicate work here in the bay area: ObataNoblin
I recently visited Manzanar and ate an apple from one of the trees tended by a person who was held there in the camp. The roses are still growing. Someone found a way to create beauty and life in that place with a garden. I have a lot of pictures and notes.
My husband and I planted a Canada Red chokecherry in our front yard this year, in early April. It was a monumental undertaking, as we had it delivered and planted by a crew of three. He tied ribbons on its lower branches for May Day. We live across from a triangle shaped park in a small town in southern Colorado. There are many trees in the park with whom we are acquainted. I say, if I were ever to consider moving, "Who would sell me a park?" It's not going to happen in my lifetime! Our property has at least five trees on it, small as it is. Boxelder (male), maple, plum, elm, lilac, in addition to dwarf cherry trees and a volunteer apple!
Sep 25, 2023·edited Sep 25, 2023Liked by Alexis Madrigal
A tree that came to mind is the one that was in the far corner of Vermont Square Park in Toronto, at least in the mid-1990s. I don't know what kind of tree it was, but it had a sideways-sloping trunk that you could climb up with just the grip of your sneakers. On the other side of the trunk were low-hanging branches, and it was a big kid achievement to be able to get up into the tree just from hauling yourself over a branch.
I wrote a story about trees a few years back on Medium called 'Go and see the big trees before you die'. It was about my love of Big Trees, obviously, but also about the freak derecho storm that went through my parents' town in Iowa in 2020 and took down nearly a dozen tall oak trees in their yard. Happy for you to read it if you are keen to fit in some more tree stories.
Reminds me of the massive evergreen pine that stood outside my window in Northeast Montana for much of my childhood. My window faced the western mountains, and I always felt that tree blocked my view of the sunset, but in retrospect it feels like an integral part of the scene.
When I first read your post, I thought I'd write about one of the trees from my Midwestern childhood - on the prairie, trees are so much more rare than they are here in Oakland that you feel each one personally. But upon further consideration, I think the tree that means the most to me is the deodar cedar in our front yard, which must date back to the construction of the house in 1950. Despite at least half a century of inexpert pruning by PG&E’s minions, which has left it growing out in weird sideways loops instead of straight like the cedar on the other side of our house, this tree has persevered. Decades ago it dropped a giant limb on the front corner of our house, smashing the gutter and waking us up, but otherwise leaving the house unscathed. Now, chickadees nest in the gash left in the tree, fluttering in and out in mobs as they make their twittering way around the yard. In the winter it drops yellow pollen, leaving chalky pools everywhere. It also drops short, sharp needles year-round, making for lots of sweeping but also ensuring that corner of the yard is the only one with no traces of clay, just soft, sweet loam the plants love. The maple is a show-off and the oaks seem determined to create armies of themselves, but the cedar is content to just be.
What beautiful observations. The chickadees! I can see them. And the cedar’s role in your local soil formation. God, I love all of this (and would gladly read about a Midwestern prairie tree, too!)
I have so many memories of trees...but a particular one that I treasure was from 1983, a couple of months after the Ash Wednesday bushfires. Pa and I had collected acorns in one of the towns that had been spared, and on an eerie ethereal Saturday morning we wandered around our cloud-wreathed blackened property (on which there were dotted surreal belladonna flowers that had sprouted from the scorched earth between the charred trunks that were the only remnants of a once magnificent garden) like demented squirrels, stuffing acorns wherever there was a suitable soft place. Mighty oaks grew from them, but I haven’t been back since it passed into other hands on my mother’s death.
Wow, thank you for this story. Being a Californian, we are familiar with fires so bad that they take a name and are permanently fixed in minds and calendars. But I did not know about these bushfires. That sounds terrifying. Also, this memory of the ritual replanting... I wonder if you could see them from a Google Earth image or street view (sounds rural, maybe not street view). In any case: thank you for sharing.
I will send photos as soon as I figure out how! In response to your call for history of a special Tree: When I lived in the big city (Denver area) there was an old cottonwood Tree that used to hang out over South Broadway, far enough to create a canopy. I commuted up and down Broadway for work for about six years. Tree always greeted and covered me. Last time I looked for him, he had been severely cut back. Sad.
I always how when that happens to a tree that it will grow back bigger and better than ever. It happens! Not always, but sometimes. Around here, they chopped a redwood from full triangle to full little toadstool, and it looked totally ridiculous at first. But you look now and it is struggling upward.
Our backyard is so cool! I knew that the apple tree was really old but I sort of thought that it was a lot older than i turns out it is. Since i thought it was older than my grandparents and it's actually as old as my parents. The tree was in worse condition than it is now (even though I don't really remember the tree then) because my dad pruned it, I'm really glad he did because otherwise it probably would've died. Without that tree our yard would look empty, in the summer it provides shade and in the winter, in the winter weeeeelllllll, in the winter it sorta just takes up space and drops leaves buuuut, I still think it's beautiful and wonderful and, well you get the point. What I'm really trying to say is that I think that this tree plays a huge roll in our lives and in our back yard and without it I would be sad.
I have an intense connection with the iconic North American west coast tree the Arbutus. I’m in Canada, and if you cross the border it’s known as Madrona. This gorgeous, mostly smooth barked tree drops giant, cinnamon-like curls of bark all over the hillsides in mid summer. I make ink from it. It’s just coming into red berry season now and soon it be covered with feasting birds. We have one outside our window and I look forward to the red ochre trunk shining like a beacon in the winter rains.
When I was born on Long Island in the 1960s, my dad planted a tree in our front yard. We moved when I was 7 and again when I was 12 because of my dad’s jobs and I was pretty tortured by us leaving that tree and those moves. It was literally the only thing left to remind me of my time as young kid, and it was a distant memory. I remember so clearly the night before our second move, super pissed at my dad, facing another uprooting, that I would NEVER move my kids and subject them to the pain he was putting me through.
Advance 20 years. My first child is born and I have an image of me, crazed by sleep deprivation, planting a royal star magnolia at our first house for my March-born daughter just days after she was born. Two years later, a kousa dogwood for my April-born son. Five years after that - a coral bark maple for my January born son. All promising to blossom around their birthdays.
So, I half lied to my 12 year old self twice. We did move from our first house, but just a mile away. And damn if I didn’t didn’t dig up two of the trees and bring them with us (the magnolia being too big at that point, replaced by a new one). We moved 10 years after that, 1/4 mile from the first house and I uprooted all three trees by hand and moved them…the last one as the moving truck was filling house #3 with the stuff from house #2.
My kids take three trees for granted now. I don’t.
What a beautiful testament. We planted SO MANY trees at my parents’ house in Washington, and I know (eventually?) they will leave that house and the property will pass on to someone else. I like to think I won’t be totally heartbroken, but I promise nothing! At this point, some are 50 feet tall, so I can’t even contemplate moving them. BUT I do sometimes want to sneak a prune in on their fruit trees, which they have let assume a feral configuration.
What a wonderful thing to do
We moved into this house in 1985. I chose it because it had appeared to me in a dream, so I never even looked in the back yard. When I did, I discovered a huge avocado tree. I name things and somewhere along the line, that tree became Ambrose. I have no idea why. Things, like my characters, name themselves and tell me who they are. I fought this for years believing I was abnormal since I wasn't trained as a writer and survived my first fifty years as a dissociative with twelve selves. Even now at 72, my therapist will tell me, "That's normal, Fran, for everyone," because I still don't understand how most people work. Then I read an interview with Alice Walker who talked about how her characters would arrive and take over, and in another interview, I watched Toni Morrison explain that she never meant to write about slavery, but the characters showed up and refused to leave so the world now has Beloved. Seeing them, and James Baldwin, as spiritual mentors, I stopped fighting and began enjoying the appearance of characters like ghosts that speak from the hundreds of rooms in my mind.
Ambrose has rarely been pruned. Long ago, a man who came to replace my garage door stopped and stared up at Ambrose in awe. He said, "I grew up on an avocado farm, and that is the biggest avocado tree I've ever seen!" He's the one who told me Ambrose only bore one avocado, if any because, back in the day, you needed a male and female avocado tree near each other for pollination. There's only one other avocado tree in the neighborhood, April, who bears the most delicious Haas avocados I've ever eaten. She's even bigger than Ambrose but the garage door guy didn't see her. Ambrose's lone avocados, bitten once and dropped by squirrels, is a smooth-skinned variety with watery fruit compared to a Haas. I have no idea what kind it is, but he and April are apparently not compatible.
A year after we moved here, my ex embarked on an affair, and my 12-year marriage was suddenly over. Ambrose became more than a wonderful, shady companion. He held me up over and over as I sobbed with my arms around his rough trunk or laid my hand against him for comfort. He's survived years of California drought during which he still grows beautiful, soft red leaves in the Spring that slowly change into dark green fans that wave in the hot Santa Ana winds when the desert is cooler than the city. He also grows clusters of tiny flowers that are rarely pollinated because there is no companion tree. I talk to Ambrose every day, sometimes thanking him for his steadfast modeling of survival that has kept me from leaving Earth too early. He's shown me how to send my depression deep into the Earth like his roots and raise my face to the sun, like his leaves. I'm still here because he's still here.
I worry, now, that I'll have to move into some insipid thing called "Senior Living," and leave Ambrose behind. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power discovered him and recently pruned him away from the precious phone lines for only the fourth time since I've known him. They did a terrible job because they cared for the lines, not him, but I don't worry because he always grows back, faster for the pruning.
If I have a choice, and no one can say that I don't, I want my spirit to pass into Ambrose when I die. I'll add my strength to his and together we'll withstand anything climate change throws at us as we spread shade over new generations of Angelenos.
If you every want to do a renovation/expansion on your house, and really want to close the circle, Gyo Obata's son is now a partner of a small residential architecture firm doing very nice delicate work here in the bay area: ObataNoblin
Oh wow! I am 100% keeping that in mind.
I recently visited Manzanar and ate an apple from one of the trees tended by a person who was held there in the camp. The roses are still growing. Someone found a way to create beauty and life in that place with a garden. I have a lot of pictures and notes.
That’s an incredible experience. If you have some bits that you feel like sending over, email me!
Would absolutely love to. It was such a moving experience and I learned so much. Let me know the best email to reach you.
Alexis.madrigal@gmail.com is perfect
Amazing!
My husband and I planted a Canada Red chokecherry in our front yard this year, in early April. It was a monumental undertaking, as we had it delivered and planted by a crew of three. He tied ribbons on its lower branches for May Day. We live across from a triangle shaped park in a small town in southern Colorado. There are many trees in the park with whom we are acquainted. I say, if I were ever to consider moving, "Who would sell me a park?" It's not going to happen in my lifetime! Our property has at least five trees on it, small as it is. Boxelder (male), maple, plum, elm, lilac, in addition to dwarf cherry trees and a volunteer apple!
A tree that came to mind is the one that was in the far corner of Vermont Square Park in Toronto, at least in the mid-1990s. I don't know what kind of tree it was, but it had a sideways-sloping trunk that you could climb up with just the grip of your sneakers. On the other side of the trunk were low-hanging branches, and it was a big kid achievement to be able to get up into the tree just from hauling yourself over a branch.
I wrote a story about trees a few years back on Medium called 'Go and see the big trees before you die'. It was about my love of Big Trees, obviously, but also about the freak derecho storm that went through my parents' town in Iowa in 2020 and took down nearly a dozen tall oak trees in their yard. Happy for you to read it if you are keen to fit in some more tree stories.
https://medium.com/farewellalarms/go-and-see-the-big-trees-before-you-die-6f9f925fa502
Can’t wait to read it!
Reminds me of the massive evergreen pine that stood outside my window in Northeast Montana for much of my childhood. My window faced the western mountains, and I always felt that tree blocked my view of the sunset, but in retrospect it feels like an integral part of the scene.
Entrancing and soulful and now I'm thinking about all the trees in my life. thank you Alexis.
Gorgeous, Alexis. Thank you for sending me down, or up, a tree.
Thanks, Samin. You know this tree well!
When I first read your post, I thought I'd write about one of the trees from my Midwestern childhood - on the prairie, trees are so much more rare than they are here in Oakland that you feel each one personally. But upon further consideration, I think the tree that means the most to me is the deodar cedar in our front yard, which must date back to the construction of the house in 1950. Despite at least half a century of inexpert pruning by PG&E’s minions, which has left it growing out in weird sideways loops instead of straight like the cedar on the other side of our house, this tree has persevered. Decades ago it dropped a giant limb on the front corner of our house, smashing the gutter and waking us up, but otherwise leaving the house unscathed. Now, chickadees nest in the gash left in the tree, fluttering in and out in mobs as they make their twittering way around the yard. In the winter it drops yellow pollen, leaving chalky pools everywhere. It also drops short, sharp needles year-round, making for lots of sweeping but also ensuring that corner of the yard is the only one with no traces of clay, just soft, sweet loam the plants love. The maple is a show-off and the oaks seem determined to create armies of themselves, but the cedar is content to just be.
What beautiful observations. The chickadees! I can see them. And the cedar’s role in your local soil formation. God, I love all of this (and would gladly read about a Midwestern prairie tree, too!)
I have so many memories of trees...but a particular one that I treasure was from 1983, a couple of months after the Ash Wednesday bushfires. Pa and I had collected acorns in one of the towns that had been spared, and on an eerie ethereal Saturday morning we wandered around our cloud-wreathed blackened property (on which there were dotted surreal belladonna flowers that had sprouted from the scorched earth between the charred trunks that were the only remnants of a once magnificent garden) like demented squirrels, stuffing acorns wherever there was a suitable soft place. Mighty oaks grew from them, but I haven’t been back since it passed into other hands on my mother’s death.
Wow, thank you for this story. Being a Californian, we are familiar with fires so bad that they take a name and are permanently fixed in minds and calendars. But I did not know about these bushfires. That sounds terrifying. Also, this memory of the ritual replanting... I wonder if you could see them from a Google Earth image or street view (sounds rural, maybe not street view). In any case: thank you for sharing.
what a thoughtful gesture
I will send photos as soon as I figure out how! In response to your call for history of a special Tree: When I lived in the big city (Denver area) there was an old cottonwood Tree that used to hang out over South Broadway, far enough to create a canopy. I commuted up and down Broadway for work for about six years. Tree always greeted and covered me. Last time I looked for him, he had been severely cut back. Sad.
I always how when that happens to a tree that it will grow back bigger and better than ever. It happens! Not always, but sometimes. Around here, they chopped a redwood from full triangle to full little toadstool, and it looked totally ridiculous at first. But you look now and it is struggling upward.
Our backyard is so cool! I knew that the apple tree was really old but I sort of thought that it was a lot older than i turns out it is. Since i thought it was older than my grandparents and it's actually as old as my parents. The tree was in worse condition than it is now (even though I don't really remember the tree then) because my dad pruned it, I'm really glad he did because otherwise it probably would've died. Without that tree our yard would look empty, in the summer it provides shade and in the winter, in the winter weeeeelllllll, in the winter it sorta just takes up space and drops leaves buuuut, I still think it's beautiful and wonderful and, well you get the point. What I'm really trying to say is that I think that this tree plays a huge roll in our lives and in our back yard and without it I would be sad.
I have an intense connection with the iconic North American west coast tree the Arbutus. I’m in Canada, and if you cross the border it’s known as Madrona. This gorgeous, mostly smooth barked tree drops giant, cinnamon-like curls of bark all over the hillsides in mid summer. I make ink from it. It’s just coming into red berry season now and soon it be covered with feasting birds. We have one outside our window and I look forward to the red ochre trunk shining like a beacon in the winter rains.
Another fascinating post. The magic of trees - thank you 🙏