Plant a Tree
{A Written Practice}
Plant a Tree
So you want to live near a forest?
The forest that we steward in Northern California is primarily comprised of Old Growth Douglas fir trees, but also includes hard-leaf Maple, Bay Laurel, and California Buckeye. There are a few outliers as well: Coastal Live Oaks, some Madrone.
We want to steward in a way that leaves no footprint so that people who see the forest can’t tell that we’ve done anything at all, but this is something like the way a duck swims: you can’t see any effort on the surface, but beneath it, they are paddling. We spent the first year on the land clearing deadwood, and studying it, and now in our second year we are taking a slightly more active approach to cultivation.
Before you plant a tree, we think its a good idea to study the ecology deeply. Where we live in California, people unhesitatingly plant things from all over the world. We have a Mediterrenean climate, so many things will grow here. There are front yards filled with cacti from Madagascar, succulents from South Africa, etc. And although these are beautiful, they are not from this place. If we approach place with an ethic of reverence, aware that the animals and plants have co-evolved, asking ourselves who lives here, and what kind of food they eat, it can be more respectful, and mutually beneficial to plant Native species.
And the Native species appreciate this. After spending a year studying the meadow in the forest, we noticed the conditions in which California Buckeye thrive, and decided to augment their numbers. Since there are already many Buckeyes in the area, we started out scouring the ground under them around the time they drop their nuts. Buckeyes are so called because their nuts (are they technically nuts or seeds?) resemble the eye of a buck deer, or so someone thought. Slightly larger than a golfball, and encased in a fleshy husk, they are full of protein that sustains the growing sapling for several months.
When Buckeyes sprout, after a rain, they break open and extend the envelope of a shoot (it looks like a pink tail) into the ground. This sheath bifurcates at a certain point, and roots extend down from it, and the sapling opens up from it. It then slowly proceeds to put out parachute-like leaves in clusters. They grow quickly in early spring, nourished by the rain, and primarily by all of the nutrients stored in the buckeye itself.
To our surprise, though there were hundreds of buckeyes on the trees in February, there were almost none of them on the ground. How come? Because, apparently, buckeyes are delicious to squirrels, one of the only creatures who is not poisoned by their tannins. The squirrels go absolutely bonkers for them. (NB: Do not eat buckeyes yourself. To us, poison.) For this reason, growing under the larger buckeyes there were very few babies. To add to their numbers, I filled a 5-gallon bucket with California buckeyes from nearby, buckeyes living in the suburbs a few minutes away, where the squirrels were feasting on other things and left them alone.
Over several days, I first soaked, and then hand-planted about fifteen of them around the edges of the meadow. I scattered another sixty of them along the dirt road, in areas where recent tree removals had left the land a bit barren. Knowing that the squirrels enjoyed them, I carefully covered each buckeye I planted with a morsel of moss, a bit of earth, something to keep them from seeing it. It didn’t occur to me that the squirrels were sniffing them out. By the second week, the squirrels had found and devoured eight of the buckeyes I’d planted. By week three, eleven. Five weeks out, there were two remaining.
It’s no joke making it in the forest. These two remaining are about nine inches tall now. I water them regularly, and care for them a tiny bit like children. Having thirteen of them eaten gives me additional respect for the two who made it, and also makes me a fiercely protective. I’ve had several conversations with the squirrels about this, admittedly one-sided. Most of these conversations start out something like, “Are you serious?”
When I first planted them I said a bit of a blessing, something along the lines of, “If it pleases the forest, I hope that you grow well.” In this, I suppose I opened myself up to the squirrels, who heard the prayer, and perhaps thought, “You mean– if it pleases the squirrels.”
As a sort of mitigation strategy, I’ve planted an additional ten buckeyes in the patio of our townhouse, ready to transplant if necessary, into the forest, as reinforcements. With those I figure I’ll wait at least a year, until the buckeye itself is completely used up, so that the squirrels aren’t tempted to remove them. One that I planted a year ago is nearing three feet in height, and bushy with vibrant green leaves. My eyes love resting on its color, and I find these trees so beautiful in their shape and proportion.
One of the benefits of planting trees is this active role in caring for the Living World, which deeply fortifies our connection to it. In order to plant well, we have to learn the applied ecological knowledge of place. It draws us into studying soil, studying the layers of the canopy, studying shade and light, and the succession of the forest. It also draws us into relationship with wildlife. I don’t recognize all the squirrels, but I do recognize some of them, who I can now chastise by name. “Leave the buckeyes alone Bongo. I know you can hear me…”
I also appreciate that, like many things in Nature, the seeds are a gift. We can obtain them, if we are attentive, at no cost. And then we take care of them. Like us they need good soil, proper nutrition, water, and sunlight. If we attend to them patiently, consistently, they grow, growing us along with them, showing us how to have our roots planted deep in the earth, and our crowns reaching toward the heavens.
So go plant a tree.
UPDATE: Several months after writing this essay, and we are down to one buckeye from the original fifteen. It happens to be the one pictured in the photo above at left, and she is about twice that size now, the original buckeye having dissolved. She is, hopefully, out of danger of being eaten, and on to the next phase of life. Based on these odds, we start to understand why trees drop thousands of seeds, cones, pods, etc. It ain't easy out here being a tree.
Related Practices:
See Befriend a Tree. See Prune Your Trees. See Forest Bathing. See Gardening. See Get to Know Your Local Flora and Fauna. See Eat Seasonally. See Forage. See Nourish the Roots. See Hawaiian Indigenous Natural Farming. See Living Water. See Peace with the Earth.Photography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.