GET GROWING!
THE LITTLE TREE THAT COULD
By LADYBUG
This time of year, it looks like we’re having a wedding in the backyard with pretty petals in shades of pink floating down like a shower of confetti.
They come from a crabapple that is one of those happy accidents gardeners celebrate.
When we moved to this house several years ago, a virgina creeper covered the chainlink fence at the back. It looked gorgeous in fall when it turned a flaming orange-red, and provided a living screen the rest of the year.
The one issue I had with it, though, was its rapid growth. Make that rapid growth on steroids. Each season, it sent out several feet-long tendrils that entwined themselves around everything in sight. Since I’d put in perennial beds in front of the fence, that didn’t go down too well with me as you can imagine. Luckily, its hold is gentle and it can easily be pulled off or separated from the roses, peonies, phlox or whichever plant takes its fancy.
It’s quite a bit of work, but fond as I am of the creeper, I am loath to remove it altogether.
And so each spring I spend hours trimming wandering stems, taming them into some sort of order.
Which is what I was doing the year after we moved in when I spotted a thin spindly trunk abutting the fence.
It looked like a plum tree, I thought excitedly, and began clearing around it. It must have sprouted from a seed dropped by a bird or a rabbit or squirrel for there was no way someone planted it there, and the poor thing was struggling to breathe, choked as it was by the virginia creeper. I noticed that several branches (or what would have been branches had they been allowed room to grow, they were thin stems at this point) grew horizontally along the fence, tied down to it by the creeper. I freed them gently and then stood guard, as it were, making sure the creeper was kept at a safe distance.
It was almost like the tree got a surge of new life and it bounced up. The next spring, when it rewarded me with its first tentative blooms, I realized what we had was a crabapple, not a plum.
It has only grown taller and fuller since and now bursts into glorious bloom each year. Later, it hosts birds that come for the fruit.
I sit back and watch, imagining more trees sprouting in someone else’s garden – gifts from birds that visit our little tree that could.