If you ride around the country, you’ll see that most farmhouses, especially the old ones, are shrouded in maple, oak, and sycamore trees, green islands in the midst of open fields.
The farmers planted them to give shade in hot summers, but also as a legacy, a gift for farmers down the line so the people who came behind would have shade also.
They also suggest warmth and beauty that gives a farm and its house some dignity and character. Nothing looks like an old farmhouse shrouded in trees.
When we moved here about eight years ago, there were two giant maple trees on one side of the house, white birch, and a gorgeous stately old apple tree on the other.
Each of these trees was well over a hundred years old, and they were beginning to show it.
The farmhouse looked spare to us, especially from the front.
We imagined a beautiful ring of green all around the house. Every year, we bought some trees – maples for the front (plus a sycamore planted last year), white birches by the driveway, lilacs by the porch, gardens all around.
This year, I went out front to look and the depth of the color and the just-sprouting leaves astonished and humbled me.
I went out across the road this morning to take a look. I was amazed.
The Maples are just beginning to leaf. In a week or so, the house will be invisible from the road, making it cooler, prettier, and more private.
I think the planting of a tree – any tree – is a vote of confidence to the world and a gift to it. It is also a gift to the farm and to all those who come behind us.
Maria and I did this together, we chose and planted and watered every tree and plant together. Each tree was an act of love for each other, for the farm.
The house is becoming just what we hoped it would be, an oasis of green, gardens all around, a legacy for the families that come behind us.
You once wrote about haggling over a semi-dead tree (I think M was mortified) and bringing it home and watering it deeply. I check your blog several times a day, but do not recall seeing if the tree made it through the winter.
Good question, I’m not sure which one you mean..I’ll have to ask two made it, one didn’t
Jon…
It’s difficult to envision what will have left after we’re gone. But occasionally, we get a glimpse.
In the early 1980s, looking out to the back of our Dallas home, I noticed a sprig growing in the flower bed. I watched the errant weed grow from just inches to around two feet. Winter came and went, and the weed lived on. But whatever it was, it would never be viable that close to our structure.
So, I dug it up and replanted it in the middle of the yard. I watered and fed it. I even treated an infestation of tree boring beetles.
After that, we continued on our odyssey with career stops in Houston, much of Florida, and Arizona. But last year, with time on my hands, I used Google Maps to see what our Dallas home had become.
Over the rooftop, I could see the limbs of a 40-foot Cottonwood tree.
I am fairly new to your posts and, as such, have not seen one about your having a ‘tiny library’ box at the edge of your lawn. Yet, I’m pretty sure that’s what I’m seeing in this photo?
Yup