The Quiet Inspiration of Trees

It’s been a tough year. It feels a little like our gardens form a metaphor this year for the world outside, for the political upheaval, for the stories of flash floods and forest fires. Outside of the human world and the wider environment, in the microcosm of the garden, communities of plants are also in turmoil. Some are thriving despite another hot and dry summer season. Others, just like many human communities right now, or like many of us as individuals, are facing their own quiet devastation. It’s interesting, inspirational and dare I say beautiful, to watch how plant communities and individuals are handling this.

I have a favourite apple tree, Tom Putt, gifted to me on a garden visit to the Wade Muggleton’s lovely permaculture garden here in Shropshire years ago. It was the first tree we planted after stripping the concrete from our old farmyard and beginning to create the garden. Soil conditions were harsh here in those days, but it grew well in its first years, putting out good, vigorous growth. In later years, it produced beautiful, large red cooking apples and barely a year goes by without me rushing out to fill a basket and camera with apples and pictures of apples, so bright they almost glow! It’s been a wonderful tree and I’ve loved to watch it grow. One year I kept a little chair beneath the canopy to sit and read with my back to the tree. We had lots of happy times.

But recent years have been hard. The weather has been tough. Last year, there were very few apples. My little tree was clearly struggling.

Over winter and in the Spring, I did what I could to tend to the soil and this year it seemed to bounce back. In Spring the blossom was glorious and after the petals dropped, plenty of fruit were swelling, as fruit do. But as they continue to swell, the tree that surrounds them is shrinking in, losing colour, failing to push out shoots or anything like its usual quota of leaves. This tree is putting everything it’s got into the fruit. The leaves are barely there and those that have grown are stunted or discoloured. No shoots are emerging, no growth at all, barely any green to feed the tree, to keep it alive. Some days I can barely bring myself to watch and turn on my path through the garden to look to other trees, other plants with brighter leaves, more fulsome canopies.

Other days I can’t help but admire the beauty to this quiet, messy heroicism. This mother tree, tending to her young, raising these apples, these little nuggets of hope for the future. There is no knowing how her strategy will play out. Will she produce viable fruit in the end? Will she even make it to another year?  Or could this be a last meal gifted from her for the birds, the insects, the small animals and for us? Will this be her last seed, her last chance at continuing to reach into the future? It’s messy and imperfect, wholly uncertain, yet still, relentlessly the movement of this tree is towards hope, towards the generation of life, towards nurturing care to the very last moment.

What a beautiful inspiration this tree makes.