White Pines paint orange circles on the snowy landscape

We are in a cabin up North.  Those are two great words if you live in Michigan, aren’t they - up North?  Every window contains forest. We are surrounded by towering White Pines, stout Oaks crusted with sage colored Lichen, and Beeches still holding onto their pink-orange leaves.  The snow, falling softly an hour ago, is now horizontal and carries oak leaves it has pulled from the forest. These are leaves that will never suffer the humiliation of being raked, or heaven forbid, blown. Yeesh. Forests are places that teach us that we don’t have to rake the leaves.  Alas, I’ll save that sentiment for another rambling post.  

What is a forest?  Think about it for a minute.  I sincerely wish I could hear your answer.   I think of it as a place where trees have planted themselves.  As a tree planter, I especially notice the relief, the calm, the peace I feel when I sit in a forest.  Of course, part of this stems from the obvious realization that I have no work to do here. There are few corners of my life in which I have no work.  The greater calm comes from being in a perfect landscape, one in which there is no human hand in evidence. There is a supreme order in what might seem like chaos to us who dwell in human-constructed landscapes.  Here in the forest there is no tree “planted,” no decisions made about species, number, or placement. What a relief. Every line, every color, every form here is placed by the hand of nature. The supreme force of this planet is manifest to the senses here.  

The forest is a true home - this is the home that mankind erases to build his. I feel much more at home in the forest than I do in my house in the city.  My impulse in the city is to constantly plant trees in remediation of what is missing. I am essentially building a fortress (isn’t that interesting - forest and fortress?) to protect me from ecological anxiety that’s been brewing for a couple hundred years.  It is more acute than ever as we point with precision to its causes and solutions. Climate chaos and eco-anxiety is another tendril of this conversation to be pursued later.  

I noticed myself planting trees like crazy all around my childhood home, and around the first house I owned, spilling out into the neighborhood.  That was 25 years ago. It was actually the filling of these yards and vicinities with trees that precipitated our move to the East side over a decade ago.  The house I speak of is very close to Clark Park. When I moved from this house I decided that I would not mow, prune, or tamper with the landscape there. It has been interesting to watch the dozens of trees mature on that little lot and a half.  

I am recounting all this to express my delight at finding, in this yard, trees that have planted themselves.  There now exists a grove of Paw Paws where I struggled to keep 3 alive in their first years. Now that the Birches, White Pines, Cedars, and Maples have grown up the Paw Paws have the understory that they love.  The best discovery of recent years has been a couple of Sycamores that planted themselves. They are now eight feet tall and thriving in a way that I have not seen from transplants. There is no doubt that these came from the majestic Sycamores of Clark Park. 

This is delightful for several reasons: the first is that this is nature making the decisions, which are far wiser than what my 25-year-old self could have conceived, about what trees to plant in my yard.  It is funny and slightly embarrassing to admit that I planted a Crimson King Maple and some Blue Spruces as my first trees in this barren yard. We all grow. Those trees are still there, but here come the wise Sycamores.  Because they planted themselves, they can grow a strong natural root structure that will never be compromised or abbreviated by cutting for transplant. Most trees we know have at one time undergone this serious surgery. Of course, this means that all their primary roots were chopped, forcing them to split and branch into smaller ones, and maybe even taking the shape of the container into which they were placed during the move.  So, the first delight is looking at trees that I know are free, natural, and not repressed.  

The second delight is that since they planted themselves, they obviously found a place that they consider hospitable; there was no human guessing at whether they would like it here, or if it was an aesthetically suitable place.  Now, when I walk through this yard, I am reminded not of a naive decision I made or an action I took, but of nature’s supreme wisdom.  

The third delight is that these trees contain the genetics of Sycamores planted over one hundred years ago in one Detroit’s oldest, grandest parks.  These are not the latest hybrids or clones of some tree deemed worthy of mass replication; these are very old varieties that cross-pollinated naturally, producing healthy seedlings, and now saplings.  This is key because, as you probably realize, we tend to mow our parks religiously, which prohibits any trees from reproducing, or at least producing offspring that live much past germination. Parks are usually places created by human hands and where wilderness is not welcome.  How do we value both the forest and the park at the same time?

This brings me back to the work we do planting trees.  A big part of our mission at Arb Detroit is creating spaces for trees to grow in perpetuity.  Are we creating parks? Forests? Something in between? We hope to create landscapes that give trees everything they need to grow to maturity, and where there is little need to mow and manicure.  Isn’t it amazing in Detroit how forest have moved into any area that has not been mowed for five or ten years? We asked the question recently whether we would allow the offspring of trees in the arboretum to grow.  I think that the answer is yes, but ask me again when I’m 90.  

I imagine a small forest of Ginkgoes where we first planted 3, a Paper Birch forest where we planted 3, a Beech forest, a Dawn Redwood grove.  Aren’t 12 trees better than 3? What we will watch out for are trees deemed invasive. Because we aim for the arboretum to exhibit the form and diversity of trees it would not be in our interest to just allow any tree that germinates to grow in the arb.  For example, we would prevent Siberian Elm and Ailanthus proliferation. If they want to grow up in a field across the street that goes unmowed I’d be happy to assist in their protection- more trees, more better.  

I’m not trying to be a tree snob- I’m trying to bring more diversity to our treescape.  And we already have lots of Elms, Poplars, Box Alders, Silver Maples, Mulberry, Ailanthus, and Sumac doing their thing, and doing it well.  That’s because they planted themselves in places where they thrive. Part of our project is building these existing forests into the arboretum and protecting them too.  We are not just transplanting trees into new spaces; we are looking for existing stands of trees to clean up just a little to make them friendly and inviting to neighbors.