A Tree and Me.

I spent the weekend with an unlikely traveling companion.

A young Prairie Fire crabapple tree.

That might not be as odd as it sounds. Maybe you’ve read the recent stories about how trees in the forest are able to communicate through their root systems. Even collaborate on things like fighting off an invasion of caterpillars.

It’s possible trees are more like us than we know. Sometimes I wonder if they exceed us, at least in their ability to work alongside one another for the common good.

This tall sapling showed up in my life on a Saturday morning. The tree was a good deal, made available by a partnership between the city forester and an organization named the Tree Trust. The only thing my wife and I needed to do was pick it up.

What’s more, we were in the market for a tree. The pine in the side yard of our weekend place in Southeastern Minnesota had grown spindly and feeble. The final indignity came when we hung a Christmas decoration in a high branch and the tree bent over double like the one in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. It was a mercy to saw it down.

We arrived at the public works facility on a Saturday morning, armed with the assurance we would be getting a healthy sapling four to six feet in height. The email from the city people expressed confidence in their ability to fit our new tree into whatever sort of vehicle we happened to be driving.

So when we looked at the towering forest of trees standing in their plastic pots outside the public works garage, we wondered. Where was the sapling made for our little car?

Good news! The young woman working in the fluorescent safety vest beamed. The people at the Tree Trust had hit it out of the park this year. There wasn’t a tree in the crop less than ten feet tall.

We selected a tree a few inches shorter than the rest and laid it on its side in the back of our Subaru. The branches hung five feet out the back end. The lift gate stuck straight up in the air. Alarm bells dinged frantically, with no possibility of shutting them off.

This would work to get the tree to our driveway a few miles away. As far as the two-hour journey south to the tree’s final destination, we might as well be planning to transport a redwood.

You tend not to think about the specifics of trees, until one arrives in your driveway looking like a tall gawky orphan. The first thing that hits you is just how thoroughly a tree lacks the advantage of easy mobility. The second thing is that you have a responsibility to this tree.

It was just standing there in the driveway. Silent. Alone. Really tall.

The tree came with a 36-page Tree Owner’s Manual put together by the United States Department of Agriculture. It was full of notes about planting and future care. Not a lick of advice about what to do with a tree left standing in your driveway, its roots sunk in a plastic pot and no easy prospect for getting it to its new home.

I checked into renting a U-Haul, but that would send the cost of our bargain tree somewhere north of $200. My wife and I searched our memories. Maybe there was some vacant lot nearby in need of beautification. Maybe we should ask the neighbors if they could use a new tree.

I could feel a bond forming between the tree and me. I was determined to do the right thing by it.

It was my wife who finally hit on the answer. The contractor who’d remodeled our kitchen and basement owned a big pick-up truck. It had spent much of the previous summer parked in our driveway.

He’d become a good friend over the years, and agreed to a trade of vehicles. He even helped me wrap the potted roots in a garbage bag to keep the soil in place. Then we laid the tree in the back of the truck. The Tree Owner’s Manual suggested securing the tree’s crown if it would be riding in an open truck. I found some old burlap in the shed, and wrapped it tightly around the branches. We were ready to hit the road early the next morning.

2 a.m., my eyes flash open. Panic rising in my throat. There was a sentence echoing in my brain. “Tree roots need oxygen.” I’d read it in the Tree Owner’s Manual, in the section about not overwatering a tree or piling too much dirt on top of the root ball. Now it was haunting me like the last vestiges of a bad dream. I had left my tree trussed up in a plastic garbage bag in the back of a truck just like one of Tony Soprano’s bodies.

I pulled on my jeans and t-shirt, crept downstairs and out the back door, climbed into the bed of the pick-up, and quietly ripped giant air holes in the plastic bag.

The next morning the tree was still lying in the bed of the truck. I had no idea how to tell if it was breathing or not. We drove south.

At highway speed the branches quickly liberated themselves from their burlap wrapping and rode in the wind the way a dog sticks its ears out the car window so they can flap in the breeze. I like to think the tree experienced a sort of freedom for those two hours, a burst of wild youth before it would spend the long decades anchored to a single patch of ground.

It was one of those marvelous early days of May, when spring has finally sprung itself from the hard clutches of winter. As we drove on the high Mendota Bridge across the Minnesota River the air was full with verdant energy. The trees of the river valley were newly budded out, unfurling their leaves like millions of tiny emerald banners heralding the new member of their community making its way along the highway south.

For a tree in the first bloom of youth it must have been a grand road trip. Even without the protective burlap we managed to arrive with all branches intact. According to the instructions provided in the Tree Owner’s Manual, planting is a straight-forward affair. Mostly it involves digging a big hole of precise depth. The emotional component is more complicated.

It’s a profound thing, a tree. We forget that when trees are just the green layer populating the horizon. Or the leafy canopy high overhead. A tree is at once vulnerable and mighty. As dependent of us as we are on it in this age of changing climate and planetary overload.

A hole in the ground signifies the end of things for a person. For a tree it’s just the beginning. A tree transcends the measures of time we organize our lives around. Planting a tree is an act of remarkable optimism. Or, if you’re not so optimistic as to believe you’ll be here a decade or two hence to enjoy sitting in the shade of your tree, it’s an act of remarkable altruism.

You think these sorts of things when you have your hands deep in the rich soil, scooping it back into the hole surrounding a young Prairie Fire crabapple. The tree you just spent the better part of a weekend shepherding to a place where it can put down permanent roots.