Tag Archives: Humility

Cherry Tree Surrender

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Cherry tree with multiple yellow leaves with brown spots.

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.

close up of yellow cherry leaves with brown spots

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.

cherry leaves and branches in trash bag

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.

Where are the birds?

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Bird Feeder no birds

We have always had birds in our back yard in the winter, coming to our feeder, or rooting around on the ground. But this year, we’ve seen almost none at all. We didn’t fill the feeder over the summer–but many birds visited during that time, in the orchard and in the nearby trees and all over the place. So we expected that filling it up again would bring the usual winter birds. But I can count on one hand the birds I’ve seen. And no cardinals.

In trying to comprehend this, I noticed that only one other thing has changed. The lot behind our neighbor’s house–not visible in this photo–had been overgrown with bittersweet, and then the vines took down part of a big maple tree. Plus Margy had been cutting a lot of the invasive bittersweet.  So that field has less tree and vine cover, which some birds may have preferred.  More ominously, I’ve read that in North America the total number of birds has declined by 25% in the last fifty years.  Is it finally affecting our own yard?

I have seen a few birds here and there on my walk in the neighborhood, and there have been a few in the crabapples in the front yard. But despite our full feeder, plus a thistle feeder, and even a suet cake, no one is around.  It seems so strange and empty.  Have you noticed fewer birds where you live?

All of this got me thinking sadly about extinction, and I happened to see a documentary about the early Neanderthal humans, who lived in Europe and Asia for several hundred thousand years, before becoming extinct about 40,000 years ago. According to the DNA testing company “23 and Me”, all modern humans, except for those from sub-Saharan Africa, have between 1 and 4 % Neanderthal DNA, from interbreeding of the two related species. So the Neanderthals can be counted among my ancestors too. By the way, they were much smarter and more cultured than the myths that were taught about them early on.

There are a lot of theories about why they went extinct. But this particular documentary, Neanderthal Apocalypse, made the hypothesis that one factor was the eruption of a super-volcano near present day Naples 39,000 years ago. However that might have effected the Neanderthals, I found myself more focused on what it might do to us today. If a super-volcano were to erupt in our time, ash and debris would cover miles and miles of land, and kill all vegetation, crops, and the animals who rely on them (including us.)  Ashes and toxic gases would rise up into the upper atmosphere and block out sunlight, plunging a large portion of the earth into a volcanic winter. Civilization over.

Now this might be a depressing thing to think about, but for some reason, I didn’t feel depressed. Instead, I was reminded of how very powerful the Earth really is.  We are so small, and so reliant on all of the Earth’s interwoven life.  So, in a funny way, I felt less afraid. We humans know some things, and the activity of our species is causing damage to the climate, and wreaking havoc everywhere. But so much is beyond our control and even our understanding. It is profoundly humbling and reminds me to be grateful for how the earth provides everything we need.

So I come round to this Winter Solstice holiday, today, and say thanks to the Earth for birthing us, for feeding us, for fire that warms us in winter, for so much beauty that inspires our lives.  And I say a prayer for the birds: please come back to once again feast with us in this little patch of land we call home.