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My Nana,who was in her 80s, kept telling my parents the tree was rotten and they should cut it down before it fell on me and killed me.
The tree was very beautiful and shaded the entire yard, so my parents ignored her.
Eventually Nana’s heart gave out, and during her funeral, the tree finally fell, completely covering our tiny backyard. Nana had been right; its massive trunk was completely rotten and hollow inside. It was a miracle that it had stayed upright as long as it had. If I had been crawling in my customary place, I would certainly have been killed. I have been in love with trees ever since.
One winter when I was a girl, we had a very hard freeze, which killed or maimed many tender plants. One of our two small navel orange trees did not survive the frost. About a year later, my mother cut the tree down, leaving a brown, desiccated 6-inch stub sticking up. The other tree, which had been planted about eight feet away, was fine. After 10 totally barren years, the stub suddenly sent out leaves, and resumed its life as a tree. It is utterly impossible for a tree to survive without photosynthesizing for 10 years. I believe that the roots of the other orange tree had grafted themselves to the roots of the frost victim, and had kept it alive for all those years.
When our children were small, I was so distracted that I forgot to remove the plastic bark guard from our beautiful young crabapple tree for a couple of years. When I eventually I noticed that the bark was popping out through the gaps between the spiraling plastic, I carefully removed the tree guard and found that the tree guard had acted like a corset, creating a narrow waist in the tree’s trunk. I was alarmed. The diameter of the tree’s waist was about half that of the unconstricted trunk directly above it. The tree was so top-heavy, I was afraid it would snap off in a high wind.
I racked my brains for a solution to the problem. The tree was quite healthy, though sadly deformed.
Reflecting upon the fact that scar tissue expands much more quickly than normal tree tissue, I decided to perform “surgery.” I went in the house and collected a utility knife and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Then I went back outside and swabbed the constricted area of the tree’s trunk with alcohol in order to disinfect it. I poured alcohol on the knife’s blade, then very carefully and gently made a longitudinal cut just through the bark layer, down the entire length of the constricted area of the trunk. I repeated the operation four times, making four cuts in the bark — north, east, west and south.
The scars healed well, and by the end of the summer had expanded nicely so that the narrowed part of the trunk was nearly as wide as it would have been if it had not been corseted. The next spring I repeated the operation, making the four cuts between the original scars. By the next spring, the tree’s trunk, though scarred, was the right diameter.
Ellen Sandbeck is an organic landscaper, worm wrangler, writer and graphic artist. Send questions to ellen.sandbeck@gmail.com or Ask Ellen, 4781 Emerson Road, Duluth, MN 55803.
