Goodbye, Sugar

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008

All that was left on Friday night of the tree that towered across from my home on South Church Street in West Chester is a stump and a plastic sign with the name of the tree service that took it down and chipped most of it into oblivion. The sign flapped in the breeze, illuminated by a waxing moon and looking something like a tombstone.

That tree came down in a rush last week. Its absence leaves me profoundly ill at ease. I find my home diminished. I would like to have it back again. Do not ask me to explain myself, but in my heart I expect people to die and trees to survive.

The tree was sick. It did not look sick, it did not act sick. Its leaves were still full and lush and brilliant when they emerged last spring. But anyone who saw the hollow spaces in its thick trunk as it lay in the yard after being sawed apart would readily acknowledge that it was suffering from a disease that would ultimately have caused its collapse.

Last summer that tree shaded me from the afternoon sun as I enjoyed a glass of wine on my front stoop. Last fall that tree gave me a slide-show of color as its leaves turned from green to gold to brown. This winter the snow clung to it for an evening and outlined its branches in the shimmering blue of the night’s glow. This spring it will not be there at all.

I have photos of the tree taken from some years back. One view is upwards through its branches towards the sky, and makes me feel like standing at the feet of a giant. I once painted a watercolor of its trunk and its branches and sent that watercolor to a friend whose father had died. “Deep roots grow strong boughs,” I wrote. My friend thanked me for the card, thanked me for the sentiment. I am sure he still has it, and that it and my photographs will keep the memory of that tree alive.

I stopped by the home that the tree stood in front of Thursday night when I noticed that it had vanished. Melissa, my neighbor, told me that there was nothing to do to save it. The borough – which in West Chester is in charge of the trees that dot the sidewalks and rights of way and which give rise to its designation of “Tree City U.S.A.” – had tried to prop it up, but it was increasingly apparent that sometime in the future a strong wind would cause its limbs to crack like a weak sheet of ice and fall.

Fall on what? Perhaps only the sidewalk; perhaps only on a car’s roof. But perhaps, too, on a stroller that a pair of new parents wheeled past it on an evening stroll. The danger, Melissa – whose baby daughter came home last summer when that tree was in full bloom – and I knew, was too large to leave to chance.

Melissa and her husband Dennis are caretakers to the other tree in which I delight, the dawn redwood planted so many years ago. It still stands in the side yard of their home, where Buffalo Bill Cody stayed when he wintered his horses on the King Ranch in East Fallowfield. I would like to imagine that the tree was a sapling when Cody walked out of the house to go perform in his Wild West Show, but I honestly don’t know how old it was.

After talking with Melissa I sat outside awhile, long enough for another neighbor to walk by.

“See what’s missing?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s sad. Trees are coming down all over.”

Ironically Speaking

This appeared Aug. 13, 2006

Not that I am what anyone would reasonably call a combative person, but I do find myself occasionally berating random people over their incorrect word usage. "Irony" versus "coincidence," for example.

Irony, I explain in as kind a voice as I can muster, is when the firehouse burns down. Coincidence -- the remarkable occurrence of events -- is, well ...

Let me tell you a story.

Recently, a neighbor stopped by on her way up the street to politely inform me that I was a born fool if I ever thought the judges would give me the commissionership, but that in her opinion, not all of what I'd written over the months was complete rubbish.

She especially liked the homage I paid to the dawn redwood that stands across the street from our homes, and pointed me to Sebastian Koh, a retired math professor from West Chester University, who had a connection to the tree.

Koh, a soft-spoken and kindly fellow, explained in a telephone conversation that the dawn redwood, or metasequoia, had been discovered in China back in the 1940s by an expeditionary team sent to search for uncatalogued species of trees by his father, Shau Tong Koh, who, at the time, was head of the Department of Reforestation in the country's forestry ministry.

Let me tell you that the metasequoia is a wonderful, unique species of giant trees that, unlike its cousins in the redwood family, is deciduous. Its bright green leaves turn a reddish brown in the fall and shed to the ground. In China, whole valleys of the tree grow wild.

The species was the subject of some controversy in China, since both the elder Koh's crew, led by Zhang Wang, and a professor at Central University, Toh Kan, claimed credit for its discovery. But that debate was long over when the younger Koh arrived at the campus of the then- West Chester State College in 1970.

In his first days here, discussing his life and family and interest in horticulture, he learned that a previous mathematics scholar at the school, Robert Anderson, had had similar interests and had imported a number of species of exotic plants for his home across from the school's main campus. Touring those grounds later, he was disappointed that many of the plants had died from neglect.

But then, he said, came a surprise.

"I spotted this huge metasequoia, one of the first to be imported (to the U.S.), judging by its size," growing on amid the horticultural ruins, he said. He soon noticed others around the area, and showed them to his father when the elderly man came to visit West Chester. "He was very pleased," Koh said.

Today, Koh has three dawn redwoods - or water spruces as they are known in his native country - in his backyard in Downingtown. The first one he planted there in 1972 has grown to a height of more than 70 feet.

Judging by the fossil record, Koh told me, the dawn redwood once spread across the northern hemisphere. "In a way, they are recovering now from their former distribution," he said.

So that's it. I like the thought of someone "discovering" a tree that had grown for epochs, and then having someone else later "discover" that "discovery" half a world a way. So I am certain that the story of the dawn redwood will come up in my next conversation with the neighbor who pointed me to Sebastain Koh.

Her name? That would be Dawn L'Heureux.

And that's what I call a coincidence.