island of trees: Changing islands

A year and a half ago, when I and Gazette managing editor Catherine Wallace came up with the name, Island of Trees, for this column, we were thinking, literally, of the trees of island Montreal. But within our large, river-bound island, exist countless smaller islands of trees, sitting amidst the lakes, seas, rivers, and rivulets of the built environment. In fact, it’s ironic that we speak of heat islands when, in fact, it’s the trees and the surrounding plant life that live on islands, cool ones, while the flow of asphalt courses through our parking lots, highways, main streets, schoolyards and alleys.

For the past 20 years, my own island of trees has expanded in the quality and quantity of its members. When we first moved into our Victorian cottage, the back garden was surrounded on all four sides by the asphalt of the alley and the paved backyards on either side. In the roughly seven-metre square patch of garden thrived some giants of the self-seeded and self-managed forest that still characterizes many a Montreal alley: two cottonwood poplars, one of which was twice the height of our house, a Manitoba maple growing, literally, out of the house foundation, and one lone red ash, standing tall and skinny, reaching for the sun amidst the deep shade of the maple and poplars.

Ill-placed as these alleycats were in a small garden, I appreciated their ability to screen the bad sights and sounds of the immediate vicinity, the pattering of the plastic-like leaves of the poplars and the swish of the innumerable leaflets of the compound leaves of both ash and Manitoba maple, masked the vrooms and sirens of the densely populated Plateau Mont-Royal. The abundant leaves nicely eclipsed our view of the falling-down duplex on the Henri-Julien Street side of the alley.

But the big cats were not to last. There was no possibility of installing a proper fence, much less have a garden in their presence. The earth was devoid of nutrients and my partner fretted – with good reason – that the tallest of the poplars would lose a branch one stormy night and crash down on our little house.

It hurts to see a mature tree come down, but it’s wonderful to plant new trees. Apple and crabapple, Asian pear, Russian olive and autumn olive, filled up the empty spaces. When our first son was born, we planted a butternut, a magnolia, for the second. When we realized the butternut was going to be too big for our tiny yard – it’s easy to forget that young trees become big trees! – we replaced it with a columnar English oak. In time, the Asian pear died, the crabapple was one tree too many between the ash and the magnolia, and, eventually, the apple cast too much shade in the sunniest corner and I, hankering for an herb and scent garden, had it felled. But I’ve saved the substantial trunk to have bowls turned from the beautiful wood.

Now, each tree has room enough to for its role. The Russia olive, recently trimmed to grow wide rather than high, nicely screens that same falling-down house; the oak masks the Bell pole and breaks the overly bright lamplight in the alley; while the magnolia – struggling as it is against the irksome scale beetle – casts a pale pink Japanese spell on the early spring garden. I hope that my radical pruning of the worst affected of the branches will assure the return, next spring, of the saucer-sized flowers.

As for the ash, the only tree left of the original gang, it thrives, roundly. It’s great S-shaped branches fall down on either side of the fence between my neighour and I, giving us a measure of privacy. The enormous ball of leaves now well beyond the height of our houses is expanding in leaps and bounds, now that the tree has unfettered access to the sun.

Of all our trees, it’s the ash that I will miss most in our move to an apartment. Like so many of you who have lived a long time in one spot with a tree or two by the windows, I’ve grown attached to the great on-going show that a tree provides. I’ve seen it fill out to a good metre-size at breast height, watched the delicate, tender green of the emergent, miniature 7-leaflet leaf, turn into a dark green, large fishbone; enjoyed the play of starlings, woodpeckers and squirrels on the many branches, and seen many of the latter napping, their tail’s folded over them, in the V-shaped crook where branch leaves tree.

In my new island of trees, just 10 minutes from the old, I’m pleased that there’ll be an old ash in view, and the cottonwood across the street will patter on a windy night. But it’s the backgarden that’s the treasure trove. At least twice the length of my own, this garden is home to a katsura tree, burr oak, elder and tamarack. But the highlight, especially in winter, is an immense row of cedars which is home – at least seasonally – to lots of birds. Sitting on the back balcony overlooking the hedge, I’ll be able to savour a new soundscape, view and scents.