Spring All Over Again - Locust Petals

White petals of the black locust tree litter the garden and the deck, like confetti from a grand celebration we weren't invited to. It's impossible to see the blossoms themselves on the branch without binoculars, the tree is so tall. For twenty years I thought it was the neighbor's tree, deep in the woods, obscure and last to leaf out. Well, who really owns a tree?

As I sit here on the deck, soaking up the bright sun and exquisitely cool air, I'm thinking I might start up a pagoda dogwood farm. 

We got our volunteer by chance (I guess that's what a "volunteer" is) from one-time neighbors Chris and Julie, with the help of the local chipmunks, no doubt. Chris had a thick head of Lebanese hair and a maniacal grin. He liked The Who and wished he could party more. Julie, shy and near anorexic, spent a lot of time with her mother. Eventually they had a child and moved to Edina—the schools, don't you know.

I spotted the sprout under the bedroom window one spring day. Now it's thirty feet tall, and three of its youngins' are developing here and there out in the yard. We've given a few away.

Every spring I catch sight of the chipmunks venturing out on the delicate branches  to harvest the berries with feverish daring and precision.

Jeremy, Our neighbor to the other side, is a bachelor. He likes the local schools so much that he teaches there. One day recently, in a fit of good humor, I agreed to help him remove the buckthorn from the woods that separates our yards. I suppose it was the right thing to do, but now the privacy screen is largely gone.

"My sister's friend is a landscape designer," he told me. "She'll help me figure out what to plant there to create a new screen." Knowing Jeremy, that's not likely to happen any time soon.

A few days later, I noticed that the forsythia in our front yard had sent out a substantial sucker. I dug it up and replanted it in the disturbed soil where the buckthorn had been, along with a two-foot chunk of root—making sure it was on our side of the lot line, or at least near it. The plant is gangly, but three weeks later it's still green, and it looks to be doing fine.

As I tamped down the soil around the plant, I was reminded that we'd gotten that shrub from the woman who lived next door when we moved it, back in 1986. Cliff and Jan were among the neighborhood's original residents. A childless couple, they'd been living here for forty years by the time we arrived. Cliff worked for the phone company. Jan volunteered at the University Landscape Arboretum, where she availed herself of every opportunity to bring home cuttings from the experimental plant stock.

I'm sure the redbud at the corner of their house, right next to our driveway, is one of the oldest in the state. She once told me she had nineteen varieties of hosta growing in the shady northwest corner of her garden.

One day we ran into each other by the garbage cans next to the garage, and she offered me a clump of roots from the forsythia she was tidying up. At the time, I didn't know what a forsythia was.

"You know, the yellow flowers. First bloom of spring," she said.

"Oh, yeah," I lied. "Sure. I'd be delighted. Thank you."

"Don't thank me for the plant," she replied. "Just thank me for the labor of digging it up."

Now there's a gnomic remark.  I puzzled over it for years. Still do. 

Half a life later, the forsythia is returning home to the other side of the lot line.

Cliff and Jan used to go bowling once a week. "I don't much like to bowl," she told me once with a chuckle. "but if I stopped going, we wouldn't have anything in common." She delivered the remark without rancor, out a deep yet somehow chipper melancholy that she'd probably lived with throughout her life.

In any case, she was exaggerating. Cliff, too, liked to garden. He looked after the roses and the lawn, while she handled everything else. Back in the Korean War era Cliff planted the five Colorado blue spruce—one-dollar seedlings—that served as a privacy fence between our two back yards for several decades. A few years after planting them he severed the roots with a shovel to encourage them to go deeper, thus stabilizing the tree.

I told that story to a master gardener at the farmers' market just last week and she said, "Well, all he did was bonsai the tree. Anyway, they don't recommend planting blue spruce in Minnesota any more. Too humid."

Those trees are now sixty feet tall. I wouldn't call them bonsai. It's true, one of them blew down in a storm a few years ago--so much for deep roots--and Jeremy had a second one removed this spring. It was dead. The other three are doing fine, though on two of them the branches are bare to a height of thirty feet. Not enough sun. 

One of my great gardening challenges is to get things to grow underneath these towering spruce. Buckthorn, honeysuckle, and other invasives seem to do the best. Wild grapes. Canadian elderberry. If it's green, we'll take it.

I wonder if anyone thinks about Jan any more. Or even remembers her? In later years she had eye trouble and wore boxy wrap-around sunglasses when working out in the yard. The year Cliff died, I asked her (tactlessly, it seems to me now) where she was going to go for Christmas. "I suppose I'll be with Cliff's family," she said. "His brother lives right down the street." Then she gave that sweet little cackly laugh and added: "I don't know if they like me, but I guess I'm part of the family by now."