Trees

When Dale and I bought this house, five years ago in April, we were really pleased with our funny little block with its oddball houses and stoop-sitting neighbors, the ethnic mix and the friendliness we experienced right away from nearly everyone. What struck us, though. coming from the leafy, brownstone-y Heights, was how stark and treeless our street was. We're not in the brownstoned part of Park Slope, ours is the New Slope, the South Slope: lots of frame or brick one and two story little houses, many covered in odd patterns of siding. Of course, in my long-ago youth, this was not considered Park Slope at all, but some sort of wilderness with no name, where none dared to tread. While the architecture is kind of forgettable, what's nice is the large open sky above us, as most of the buildings are two and three stories. Walking in the spring and summer on the brownstoned streets in other parts of Brooklyn, you find yourself under a kind of Gothic arch made by the soaring branches of London Planes, Maples; graceful,  majestic and towering, shady, green, and lush. Yes, you are hearing a bit of tree envy in my tone.

There are two ways to get a street tree planted in Brooklyn. One way is to get a permit and plant it yourself, paying for it of course, and the other way is to go through the city and have them plant it, which is free. Dale and I just wanted a tree so we decided we'd apply for both and see which materialized first. That turned out to be the city method; about a year after we applied I'd begun thinking that they'd forgotten us entirely and was considering calling to find out the status of both applications, and then suddenly one day I was in the house and heard a deafening, grinding, inexplicable uproar outside, and stepped out to see what the hubbub was all about. There was a crew tearing a hole in my sidewalk:"Hey lady, you ordered a tree, right?" My neighbors began gathering in little clusters on their stoops to observe the ruckus. 

One walked over to my stoop to ask me what was going on. There are definitely two camps on the block: old timers and new arrivals, and they don't always see eye-to-eye on various subjects. The old-timers had been very nice and accepting of us, but you could tell they thought we were nuts to pay what we'd paid for the house, and when we'd had a crew there doing some renovating there were endless questions and I could see that we were definitely the object of much merriment on the street. On the tree day, one of the old-timers sauntered over to see what we were up to now.

When I, enthusiastically, informed him we were getting a tree, his face fell. " You know it's going to make leaves, right?" I assured him that I was aware trees made leaves and was OK with it. Pretty soon I had a coffeeklatsch of older guys  milling around telling me horror stories about trees of yore. One of the men was an ancient Spanish guy who had lived up the street since the 194o's;  he managed to coax astounding bumper crops of tomatoes from his rows of plants every summer, fussing over them and spoiling them like a proud grandfather. He pointed to a spot on the sidewalk a few feet away from our house. "There was a tree right there, in 1957!" said Tomato Joe, his voice shaking with emotion. "It was terrible!" 

I was so proud of our tree, watering and feeding, planting pansies and star ivy around its base, watching the leaves as they emerged and keeping neighborhood dogs and kids from doing too much damage. What struck us immediately was that the moment the square of earth appeared in the sidewalk, people strolling by assumed that it was an OK place to throw their trash, simply by virtue of its being unpaved. Every day I would fish out assorted detritus surrounding my poor baby tree: dog logs, empty bags of chips and soda cans, a disposable diaper. Muttering imprecations , I put on latex gloves and cleaned up the pit daily. Still,  I discovered that imprecations worked less well than the pansies and the tiny little border fence I put up around it. We still had litter, but I found that if our little patch looked more as though someone cared about it, there were fewer objects tossed into it on a daily basis. Still, I defended it daily, proud of my little tree. Even the dogs seemed to get the message, for the most part they chose the lamppost up the street instead.

(That summer was brutally hot, as I recall, and I set up a new hose long enough for me to water out front comfortably. In the evenings or early mornings I'd water the thirsty south-facing front yard, and of course, I would give the soil around the tree a nice soaking, too. More than once, though, passers-by stopped to ask me exactly why I was watering the tree. I think there is a perception that the street trees are "other"; either that the city waters them, or that the sidewalk trees should be able to take care of themselves. Sadly neither is the case, and during that drought summer I noticed many neglected street trees withering and turning brown.)

That fall, I was thrilled to watch the leaves turn to vivid scarlet, our own little burning bush. I kidded Dale that there was no need to go leaf-peeping in Vermont, that we had our own fall foliage tour right there in Brooklyn. One day I was with a friend, running some errands, and we got chatting about the tree, and she offered to drive me home so she could have a look. I'd been telling her how resplendent it was, a thing of beauty, and she wanted to see for herself. Driving down our spare and treeless block under gray skies as a windy rain whipped through the air. I smugly thought of the glorious shock of red leaves we were about to see, and gleefully imagined my friend's admiring gaze, her oohs and aahs. 

Pulling up to the house, I was taken aback. The wind had been fairly strong that afternoon, and there stood our tree, naked to the world but for one lonely leaf like a flag at its topmost branch, and without its layer of leaves I had to admit it was a tiny, spindly thing, barely more than a twig. My companion said cursory complimentary things about the tree but I could tell she was thinking I was out of my mind bragging to her about this little twig in front of our house. It was like my child, though, and I was proud of it, I just hadn't expected it to be completely naked all of a sudden.

Here were Dale and I, thinking that we'd start a trend of tree-planting, that if only our neighbors realized it was free, that it made the block look nice, and if nothing else, increased real-estate values, that they would all run to their phones and call the city, reserving Bradford Pears and Red Oaks, (actually we weren't given a choice of trees but did get a nice red oak) gleefully tearing up the sidewalks and that we'd have a beautiful, tree-lined street like other people do.  While that hasn't happened, gradually there have been a few young saplings making their appearances along the street here and there, standing lashed to their twin supports like the training wheels on a kids' tricycle; and some of the old-timers have conceded that our tree looks nice now, even as they shake their heads at me in the fall when they see me sweeping up the leaves.