Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd loom large in American plantsmanship. North Hill, their 7-acre garden in southern Vermont, is a place of pilgrimage, attracting hundreds every summer to the garden symposia they sponsor. When not lecturing or writing or enriching their own acreage, Joe and Wayne are likely designing gardens for others, assisting an impressive roster of clients all over North America. Wherever they pause for any length of time, however, they put down roots. These two men are habitual planters, often of trees.
Yet what they showed me across the stream from their house and in the heart of their own garden on a recent visit was the spot where they had recently cut down a yellowwood tree.
A yellowwood, Cladrastis lutea, is a relatively rare tree, and this was one they themselves had planted 25 years previously. It had thrived. A few years ago it had matured to the point that it began to flower. Seriously. "It was simply laden with magnificent white, wisteria-like racemes," Joe recalled. Meanwhile, though, the lushness of this tree's foliage was depriving everything below of all sunlight. Not even shade-tolerant plants could survive in what Wayne characterizes as the tree's ever-expanding "Stygian gloom." A patch of Oconee bells, Shortia galacifolia, "which we are terribly vain of, because it's quite difficult to grow well … it too was showing signs of attenuation," Joe added. Without any discussion, the two men agreed that the tree must go.
I mention this incident because so many gardeners I encounter revere each and every tree with Druidic devotion. A tree, any tree, is sacred. This, as Wayne and Joe pointed out, is an acceptable attitude if you are planting an arboretum (they know; they have designed such for clients). But a garden is shared space, and if a tree cannot coexist with neighbors, it must leave.
Few of us hesitate to thin a row of lettuce, so why do we find it so hard to thin the tree canopy? It's a matter of time-scale, I suppose. Removing a tree seems momentous because we may not live to see a successor reach maturity. Nevertheless, east of the Mississippi and in the Pacific Northwest, trees, if not restrained, take over the landscape, monopolizing the sunlight that is the fuel for nearly all plant growth. Refusing to cut is in itself a decision. By sparing every tree, you sacrifice all but the most shade-tolerant plants. You have no meadow, no roses, no vegetable garden, and only the most species-poor kind of "natural" garden.
Joe wonders if part of the problem lies in our view of trees as static objects, rather than incarnations of a process of birth, growth, eventual decline and death. In light of this, occasional and respectful felling becomes less threatening. When Joe and Wayne advise clients to do some thinning, they find that it shocks the tree owner less if they present it as an opportunity.
Wayne told of a client in Kentucky who was aghast at the need to remove an old maple she and her husband had planted decades before. Yet the removal made that corner of the garden dynamic again, and gave her room to plant the sweetgum she had wanted. He and Joe likewise have inserted into part of the space vacated by the yellowwood a golden-leaved black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia "Frisia." It's lacy foliage will cast a filtered, less oppressive shade.
As a garden matures, Joe observed, the opportunities to "play in the dirt" like a child, to experiment with new effects and new plants, "to have something where you get up in the morning and run out to see the first flower," grow steadily less. Unless, adds Wayne, you practice subtraction.
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Comments: 4
It was sad but for the same reason they had to go.
I spoke to them abvout it.
It is difficult to remove even a dying tree, and difficult to choose a replacement that is not exorbitantly costlt.