The Cherry Tree Dilemma: Mindfulness, Complexity and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) by Adrian Ayres-Fisher

Note: We are grateful to be able to share this blog by Adrian from her excellent website, Ecological Gardening.

In attachment blossoms fall, in aversion weeds spread. Dogen, Genjo Koan (1233 CE)

Smack in the middle of the back yard is a non-native, very short tree that, when I moved in, looked like a dwarf, would-be weeping willow. Scraggly, neglected, it stood just over five feet high, and its branches hung down to the ground all around. It took up a fair amount of space; of course nothing grew in its shade.

I did recognize it: a weeping cherry—not a naturally grown specimen of one of the beautiful Japanese varieties, but a “frankentree,” which, as Brian Funk of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has written, “are the flowering cherries on sale at home improvement stores” that “look like mops, or umbrellas, or octopus trees.” They are created when “weeping cherry branches… are grafted onto a straight trunk that was cut off at five feet tall.”  Well yes, exactly. Not only was it ungainly, but: what was the point of its existence, and what good would it do?

 I mentally tagged it for removal, but had so much other garden work, so many truly invasive non-natives to get rid of that I decided to let this tree be for a while. My practice in situations like this is to wait and see what develops over time, so I did, meanwhile considering what it might be replaced with, or what could grow under it. Summer passed, then fall and winter. During late winter pruning, I trimmed it up to its “proper” umbrella shape. Spring came. The wealth of blossoms that appeared one April morning were  quite as lovely as one expects cherry blossoms to be. Ignoring the lugubrious shape and focusing on the pale pink cloud almost induced a haiku state of mind. And then, the very next day, a crew of solitary miner bees emerged from the ground right next to the tree and converged on the blossoms. Perfect timing! That surprising event changed the reality of the situation. Did the bees live there before the tree was installed? Did a few enterprising individuals travel over from a neighboring yard one spring and decide to establish a colony?

After a couple of weeks, the blossoms done, the tree returned to its lumpen self. The ground had multiple little holes rimmed with tiny dirt ramparts that disappeared over time. They were tunnels full of bee larva that would eat stored pollen, pupate within cocoons, and emerge as adults next spring. I realized the tree would stay. This spring, after another year of care and pruning, it has bloomed even more abundantly, and the bee colony seems larger, having expanded into garden areas where I’ve loosened the soil, planted sedges and let the fallen autumn leaves lie, unraked. There are no other flowering shrubs or trees in my yard at the moment, though this will change over time. What else would these bees go for? Maybe black chokeberry or serviceberry? Perhaps bloodroot, toothwort, or other extremely early flowers? Possibly the maples that have just started flowering? There is a maple nearby, but for early flowers full of nectar and pollen, the cherry tree is what the bees have right now, so it will remain.

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A worthwhile approach in general life, as well as in gardening, is to observe, with a curious attitude, what is actually happening, suspending judgement and prior assumptions, and then responding to a given set of circumstances as skillfully as one is able. This is part of the training involved in meditation and practicing mindfulness in daily life. It is also a crucial lesson that Dr. Jennifer Grenz began to learn from the Tsleil-Waututh people when she, a trained ecologist with a specialty in invasive plant ecology, went to study with and help tribal elders manage their land in British Columbia. In her book “Medicine Wheel for the Planet,” she recounts how she went to a site with an elder, and he told her they would simply sit and watch for a while, to observe the situation in which the plants were growing and absorb the reality of the plant community in that spot.

She, who had come to that place ready to do battle with an invasive species, thinking she had the answers and knew the protocol, was dumbfounded. As she writes, “at first it felt like an eternity, a confusing waste of time. And then I could see the plants, the surrounding trees, the limits of the infestation, the small breaks in the tree canopy, the position of the sun…Then we sat some more,” before they got up and left.

This was her first step in learning to enter into relationship with the human and non-human community, as she learned to embrace the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of her ancestors and relatives. This journey continued as she saw how pollinators used the non-native plants on her farm on Vancouver Island. Her people had developed helpful salves and medicines from some of these plants, and she had to find a new way of being in relationship with them as she learned to make and use these remedies.

Yet Grenz does not dispense with western science, either, but seeks to somehow coordinate the two ways of seeing and practicing. Restoration scientists, ecologists, native plant gardeners and natural area land managers are, rightly, very concerned with invasive plants—especially those that act as thugs or tyrants, that destroy the complexity of ecosystems by destroying ecological relationships. Generalist pollinators may be able to make use of non-native flowering plants, but there are specialist pollinators that can’t. As Doug Tallamy and others have studied and shown, insect herbivores such as caterpillars must have native plants because that is what they are adapted to---they literally can’t eat non-natives. If caterpillars can’t eat, they die. Without caterpillars, no butterflies, and also fewer birds, since many species feed their babies with insects, including caterpillars. Or, as another example, the berries of non-native shrubs are often less nutritious for birds than native shrubs, or ripen at the wrong time to support migration. But everything in nature is situational, and strict dichotomies just don't work. Especially not the common division of plants into “good” and “bad,” or even “weed-bad,” “not-weed-good.” Plants move around, and humans are not the only carriers.  And not all non-native plants are ecosystem destroyers. Something like half the plant species in the Chicago region are non-native. Many simply settle in without causing much fuss.

The cherry tree in my back yard makes no fruit that I’ve seen. It is useless to birds, except as a perch, and I’ve seen no evidence of insect herbivores munching on its leaves, though I have seen the little half-moons that leafcutter bees make when harvesting materials for their nests. It looks overbred, created strictly for human profit, and reminds me a bit of one of those little lap dogs with short legs and the pushed in faces that can cause structural breathing problems. (I sometimes wonder about the ethics of dog breeding—as I equally wonder about the ethics of certain types of plant breeding.) I could cut it down and plant something else, but I’m the newcomer here, and to disrupt the neighborhood would be wrong—I am interested in reparative action, after all.

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These kinds of calculations and decisions are different on different scales. An urban backyard is an intimate space where small changes make a big difference. These must be weighed and interactions considered carefully. On a larger, landscape scale, even more attention must be paid, and equal or more care taken. The community is bigger and more complex. It is crucial to take time to learn the site well, alert for what’s there, what is growing, what animal species live there, and how they make use of the place. Nothing substitutes for developing the essential situational awareness of that particular place over time, and how things change through seasons. It helps to have mentor and to meet and learn from others who know the site well.

I have seen how buckthorn and honeysuckle have overrun and shaded out large swathes of woodland floor so that the native grasses, ferns and forbs can’t grow, which in turn deprives woodland creatures of food and habitat. And I’ve also seen what happens when we clear out the buckthorn: If you are lucky, the native plants come back. At National Grove Woods, where I am site steward, and with a group of volunteers, practice what Grenz calls “land healing,” clearing out buckthorn and honeysuckle along a small stretch of the Des Plaines River has had all kinds of salubrious effects. For some bird species, removing so much shrubby structure means they’ll probably move house. Yet the area has become a favorite roosting place for a pair of red shouldered hawks, a species that prefers wide open woods with water near by—to the consternation of the small animals that lived without that danger before the hawks had freedom to hunt. Over several years, native grasses have come back, along with sedges, mosses, fungi, and various spring and summer flowers. Cover and forage—and possibly safety—has increased for all of the small ground-dwelling and foraging animals, including insects, herps, birds, and others. So many shifts, visible and invisible. Yet overall, there seems to be an increase of life and biodiversity, so one trusts, must trust that our activities are tending in the right direction. 

***

I’ve never lived in a place where I started a garden from scratch. There are no tabula rasas on earth. To come in to a place, clear ground and start “fresh,” without understanding what’s there is unmindful in the extreme, and can be an enormously destructive act. Life is always present. There is always some web of ecological relationships. Everywhere I’ve lived has been long-settled, with the abiding marks of how others have treated the land; it’s always a question of how not only to fit into that human history, but also into the ecological history—and into possible futures.

Clearly, on a building site in which the ground has been leveled and all vegetation removed, designers and landscapers certainly have leeway to build, and should build, something like the Lurie Garden, for example. And there are depressingly numerous situations in which all that chemically laden grass absolutely should be smothered and replaced with a prairie garden, as happened at the Field Museum. Those are efforts to repair and renew severely damaged urban sites, to start knitting them back into the larger ecosystem. And anyone moving into a newbuild house in a subdivision constructed on former soy and corn fields has their work cut out.

Everywhere, it’s necessary to pay attention, to get to know the neighborhood and its denizens, the non-human citizens whose families probably have been living there longer than you maybe have been alive. To learn the lay of the land—literally. To see what relationships are in play, to understand what you are likely to be disrupting. And only then to enter the situation, making any changes as skillfully as you can, always guided by the ethic of practicing as a “balancer,” as Grenz says, or as a “plain member and citizen of the land-community,” as Aldo Leopold wrote years ago.

Related Seasonal Post:

The Beauty of Thoughtful Neglect: Spring Garden Care in the Ecological Garden

Resources:

Genjo Koan: PDF from the San Francisco Zen Center

Genjokoan: About

“Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey toward Personal and Ecological Healing,” by Dr. Jennifer Grenz (U. of Minnesota Press; 2024)

“Bringing Nature Home,” by Douglas W. Tallamy (Hachette Book Group; rev.ed., 2009) 

“A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There,” by Aldo Leopold (1st ed. 1949; 75th anniversary edition, 2024); The Aldo Leopold Foundation

Lurie Garden, Chicago

Field Museum Rice Native Gardens, Chicago