Growing Trees

When we moved into our new house, an ‘easy-care’ garden came with it – just lawn, pebble beds and a few shrubs. As we got to know it better, we could tell that it had once been a lush, mature garden. The rotting roots of large trees are still there in places, a little below the surface.

Looking around the suburb, it is apparent that we are not the only property where someone has wreaked arboreal annihilation. The abundance of flowers and shrubs is offset by a dearth of large trees. It’s as though buying a house brings out the creative urge to start afresh and express oneself with plants.

Now, what is wrong with that, I hear you asking. If it’s our garden, why can’t we do what we want with it? It’s our earth and we are entitled to do so. That’s a typical, Modern attitude. Mankind as the supreme arbiter. But it takes no account of the trees.

When you plant a tree, you are planting it for your grandchildren. It may grow slowly, but it will eventually outlive us. It is a kind of legacy – something that carries the history of the land forward.

Trees connect us to those that lived there before us, and to those who will come after. We will all sit in similar shade and look up at the sky through similarly dappled leaves. Trees have their own lives, too, that we should nurture and cherish.

Trees connect us to those that lived there before us, and to those who will come after.

I sometimes think that gardens are a good analogy for ideas. Some ideas are beautiful and smell good. These flower quickly and then die away just as fast. Some are like shrubs – they stick around for a while, but are relatively small, unobtrusive, and act as a foil for the more strident colours.

And then there are big ideas – the trees. Granted, they start out small, but over an extended period, they grow roots, add branches and gradually become tall and imposing. They make us take notice.

The problem with this analogy is that in a garden it is fairly obvious what is a flower and what is a tree. With ideas it is much harder to tell.

This is especially true of the big, bold ideas that challenge existing wisdom. These are properly trees. They take a long time to establish, and they need to be allowed to grow their roots gradually. Instead, though, we treat them like flowers. We want them to bloom immediately and are unwilling to wait. Ours is not a patient society.

Given this tendency, it is hardly surprising that the current political landscape seems to lack imposing ideas. In part, this is because electoral cycles mean that almost as soon as a tree is planted, a change of government results in it being felled while something new is planted instead. There is a great deal of incentive to cultivate flowers that beguile the electorate yet barely any incentive to plant trees.

There is a great deal of incentive to cultivate flowers that beguile the electorate yet barely any incentive to plant trees.

You see the same in academia. Research profiles need to be turbo-charged, so there is plenty of incentive to write papers, and very little to write books. They take too long. Hence, ideas get rushed into print rather than being given time to percolate and mature. Over-watered and over-fertilized, initially they grow quickly, but eventually the lack of proper roots starts to show up.

Our sense of urgency is hardest to control is when it relates to justice. Whenever people spot a glaring injustice within a situation or structure, their natural urge is to try and fix it as quickly as possible.

But large, structural injustices are usually tree-like. They have deep roots, are long-lasting, and people are used to them. And they are growing on common ground. Coming in with a chainsaw is going to upset a good few of the people sharing that land, because they like the tree the way it is. It takes considerable time and commitment to convince such people to change their minds.

Mind you, if social justice campaigners have been guilty of underestimating the durability of trees, then the designers of the new conservative garden fad are in the process of making a similar mistake.

They have brought in chainsaws and laid waste to what was there already. But, while they would like to grow trees, they are cultivating them like flowers and expecting them to grow with unseemly haste. Hardly a recipe for a durable garden.

In the end, our problem with trees and gardens comes from our inability to locate ourselves as a part of a continuum. We are rarely content to be the guardians of trees we have inherited: to respect the generosity of nature and of the people who originally planted them. Our creative urge drives us to want to build everything afresh.

In the end, our problem with trees and gardens comes from our inability to locate ourselves as a part of a continuum.

We want the glory of making our own garden in our own way as quickly as possible. In our hubris, we want to believe that every plant in the garden owes its place to us. Instant gratification, in other words, has got out of control.

It is as if we have forgotten that we share the garden with others. Not just the neighbours, animals, birds, insects and worms, but also those who planted trees and ideas in the past so that we could enjoy their maturity.

While some older trees are now rotten, many were planted well and are still viable. We may not think they are a good fit any longer, but perhaps our first instinct should be to see how the garden can accommodate them, rather than simply felling them because they don’t conform with current garden fashions.

The trees in the garden don’t all have to look the same, either. Harmony comes from multiple tunes coming together to form something greater than any individual part. A garden is a rich collection of complementary plants that work together in harmony. It is barely a garden if there is only a single species.

Personally, I would like a garden where the old and new trees play in a delicate counterpoint. In that garden pruning would be allowed, but chainsaws would be banned. And yes, there would be flowers and shrubs too, but ensuring enough mature trees to anchor the rest of the garden is what matters most of all.