I planted this Lapins Cherry seven years ago, and did all kinds of care for it over the years. Holistic sprays, pruning, copper spray this spring. But we only had one cherry ever to eat from it, and each year it continues to have problems. Each time, I looked up what to do, and tried all sorts of things. It seems to be a fungal disease. The latest advice I read was to pick off all the diseased leaves from the branches and the ground. I seem to remember trying that last year. But you can see that would be an enormous amount of work, and maybe it wouldn’t even fix the problem. We had very few blossoms, and saw very few green cherries, maybe two or three.

So today I made the sad decision to give up. Some things in the garden seem to do well, even on their own. The raspberries just started ripening. The chives are perennially yummy. Even the peach tree has given us a harvest some years. Today I ate a mulberry from our mulberry tree! The third principle of Permaculture Design is “Obtain a Yield.” But this tree has never given a yield, no matter how much time and energy I put into it. I probably hung on too long, and tried too hard over the years. I don’t tend to give up easily. Sadly, this also means giving up on the other cherry, with similar problems. While the Lapins can be self-fertile, the Black Tartarian needs another cherry for fertilization. It too has issues, though I don’t see it as often because it sits behind the Lapins when I look out my window. One more thing I feel sad about is that the birds love to perch in the tree on their way to the bird feeder or bird bath.

Because the diseases are fungal, we won’t want to compost the leaves or branches. So my current “plan” is to prune off smaller branches one by one and bag them to go out in the trash. It takes quite a bit of energy in any case, so I will work on it bit by bit over the summer. I started today.

So this post isn’t like the many websites that offer suggestions for saving dying cherry trees. This is about letting go. This is about accepting failure. This is about sadness and grief, and recognizing our limitations. This is about surrender to the larger forces in the natural world that determine which plants thrive in which places, and which plants cannot. This is about humility in our relationship to the earth community.

I am reminded of a song that meant a lot to me when I was wrestling with chronic illness and the decision to retire from work. Colbie Caillat, Try. In the lyrics is this constant refrain, “You don’t have to try so hard, you don’t have to bend until you break…” The song is mostly about trying to get other people to like you, but it spoke to me about trying so hard to keep up with work that I loved, when I truly did not have the energy for anything like full-time work anymore. It was okay to let go. I was lucky. I had reached the age of 65 where I could access Medicare and Social Security. I feel for all of my fellow chronic illness buddies who have had much harder survival journeys. We live in such a cruel society that offers so little support for people with illness. None of us should have to try so hard, to bend until we break.