Baby Tree

I love to spot errant foliage that needs to be rescued. I have a Japanese maple in my backyard right now that would be nothing but a one and a half inch memory if I hadn't spotted it striving to live in a gravel-strewn gutter. It's now four feet tall. Sometimes these rescue attempts are unsuccessful. Often I end up with some sort of oddly shaped twig-tree. I currently have a tree that has been thriving in a pot for the past ten years. It looks perfectly happy but it is only three feet tall and all of its leaves face the same way. It looks like someone took a horizontal branch from a tree and shoved it in a pot. But that's okay. If it's happy, I'm happy.

Once I rescued a little tree from a roadside crack and when it got to be about 18 inches high, I carried it to the nursery to see if the nursery man could identify it. At first he thought it was a lilac! But after crushing and smelling its leaf he said, "It's an ash. You don't want it." He said that it's not the kind of ash that people grow in their gardens. Rather it's the type they use only for root stock. If I tried to grow it into a tree, he said, it would become diseased. I was skeptical. I grew it into a tree for two years until it became diseased and had to be thrown away. I like to think it had two extra years in a happy place.

In May, the family took a day trip to Grass Valley, California. In addition to admiring the local architecture, I kept half an eyeball on the gutter. I spotted this little guy squiggling out between the cracks. I gently yanked him out, roots intact, and ran to catch up with the gang. When I got home I put him in a little pot. He dropped all of his leaves. But I kept watering him just in case. And look! He's positively BLOOMING. Metaphorically. He may or not bloom later in his life. I don't know. It's a mystery. But for now, he's happy.