Weed Of The Week

Wild Grape (Vitis, spp.) -or- Why Kill Trees for Christ?

I love Christmas trees. The smell, the look, the tradition, it all harkens back to my favorite holiday memory in Washington. I was young, maybe eight or nine. All six of us piled into our VW bus and drove off to the Moscow Mountains, just over the border of Idaho, to chop down a tree on National Forest land. Legal then. At least, I think it was. Don’t fact check me on this one. I’m not sure I’d like what it would reveal about my family.

Snowy and cold, it was typical winter weather for the Palouse region. We found a beautiful specimen (probably Douglas fir) cut, hauled, and tied it to the top of the bus. On the way home we stopped at a lodge for hot chocolate. Perfect day.

I sat under that tree, shaking presents, looking over the clear star filled night for Santa’s sleigh Christmas Eve.

Then we moved to Arizona. Everything changed. My mother decided murdering a tree and shipping it hundreds of miles as a symbol of divine devotion was immoral. Douglas firs didn’t grow in abundance in our new state. First we had a century plant stalk as substitute -- picture a dead conifer’s bare branches festooned. Next were fake trees (need I say more)? Finally, she introduced a living tree, an Aleppo pine. We kept it indoors for the holidays and planted it in the back yard afterwards. By the time I graduated and left home the tree was thirty feet high and dominated the yard. I loved it.

Her unpretentious environmental conifer concerns, though vexing at the time, eventually shaped my philosophy on our holiday traditions and consumerism. Why do we spend so much of our resources and energy just to kill our arboreal brethren in the name of Christ? It was a Druid tradition, after all. Not to be all Grinchy, but wouldn’t it be better to honor him by purchasing a living, sentient being and giving it back to the earth than chopping one down and mulching it? Idunno.

Which leads me to this holiday week’s weed: wild grape (Vitis spp.). What the hell does it have to do with Christmas trees, you ask. Though it’s a stretch, I promise there’s a salient thread. And why is it a weed? Okay this is the key point in need of clarification and where my thesis becomes most flimsy. While we grow wild grape vines in the garden, which both the birds and we enjoy the fruit of, and they are a native species in the Northeast, in much of the new growth woods they have strangled the canopies and help hasten their demise. Moreover, they choke fruit orchard trees and yes, Christmas tree plantations. This is a different tack for me. It’s an indigenous vine we intentionally planted, nourished, and benefited from. So what if it’s a weed elsewhere, especially for an industry I just sort of maligned? Because it serves my purposes.

You may or may not remember about three years ago I had embarked on collaboration with renowned tree house architect Roderick Romero and other gardeners I named the Weave Collective (Marga called my title corny). Nonetheless, Roderick and I initiated a project using grape vines to weave temporary plant containers around used tomato cages. The resulting forms looked like spiraling wooden cyclones. We harvested the vines from the grape arbor. However, when the demand outgrew the supply we drove upstate and culled forest smothering tendrils and brought them back to La Plaza.

We stuffed these containers with live cranberries and weeping hemlocks and sold them to my clients as Christmas trees to adorn their gardens or homes. Later they were to be planted in community gardens as a way to give back and sustain life instead of just killing trees. These Ecopods could be buried in the ground, the rotting wood sponging water and releasing nutrients, little self-contained hugel mounds. The former efforts were a success, pleasing clients, generating good will and raising money. The latter, a failure. Trees don’t like being shuttled in and out of apartments, up, down, and across town in the dead of winter. But it did lead to other works and eventually inspiration.

Here’s my point: as I’ve said already, weeds are a matter of perception. In these days of political upheaval, government insecurity, and general malaise, we must take care of our environment, our beloved garden, and ourselves. No one else likely will. What I propose is, as the moneys for this big Gardens Rising grant, and other (likely dwindling) resources are being distributed, much of them to go for plants and plantings, let’s step up, be creative, and find a way to maximize and monetize our gifts. Planting hedgerows and vineyards of plants many might consider weeds to harvest for cottage industry craft projects for local consumption such as by my clientele is a great entrepreneurial start. And a renewable wreath in your apartment instead of a dead tree is a way to honor, not contradict, Christ’s teachings no matter your religious leanings. I also have some advice for live trees if folks are interested. There are lots of dreary statistics I won’t go into about the tree farm industry’s effect on our planet (something I’ve discussed openly without provocation with Julia whose family owns a farm and agrees). Again, just thoughts. If you do decide to enjoy a cut tree, I’m fine with that too.

Happy Holidays!

Ross

Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos)

Together with Marga Snyder, my garden wife and fellow permanerd, I recently attended a lecture called Chelsea Grasslands Panel: Prairie in the City. Here’s how the pamphlet described the night:

Discover the intersections of the garden design, plant ecology, and cultural history of our Chelsea Grasslands during a panel featuring three experts in their respective fields and moderated by Andi Pettis, Director of Horticulture at Friends of the High Line. Guest panelists include planting designer Piet Oudolf, On the High Line author Annik La Farge, and Curator of the Native Flora Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Uli Lorimer.

Forget, for a minute, that we were in absolute geek heaven, drooling over luscious images of prairie plantings on the world’s most spectacular park (in my humble opinion). Ignore the fact we greedily gobbled up all the information so freely flowing from these giants of their professions. And don’t even think about how incredibly thrilled we were to shake the hand of and get an autograph from our absolute favorite designer, Piet "The Plant God" Oudolf. (I’ve been ripping off his brilliant work shamelessly as of late to great success in my clients’ gardens). Our collective panties practically melted. No, what I want you to concentrate on (not our panties either) is change.

All three panelists and the moderator brought up the concept of succession in natural and built environments they incorporated into their ideation and work for the High Line. This bears some explanation to bring everything into context with our weed of the week.

Here in La Plaza we are in constant dialogue with the landscape about what it once was, what it would become if we didn’t intervene, and what we ultimately want it to be. So I will try to address those points and explain what it has to do with this week’s weed: North American native tree, honey locust, Gleditia tricanthos.

If we were to be transported via time machine and plunked down in La Plaza circa 1800, our feet would get wet and likely become stuck in the muck and we’d probably by bitten by swarms of nasty black flies and other pesky critters. Then if we were to zoom forward fifty or so years every inch of soggy soil would have been filled and we’d find ourselves in a teaming diverse immigrant neighborhood fueled by thriving manufacturing and shipping industries. Another hundred and twenty years and we’d be in a bombed out and largely abandoned postindustrial and post-apocalyptic landscape. Which leads us to where we finally find hope: trees. To take it further, if we were to illustrate La Plaza’s succession like the image above it would read from primary to pioneer to intermediate to climax: fertile tidal estuary, bustling tenement neighborhood, gap tooth smile of architectural remnants and rubble filled empty lots, to at last verdant treed savanna paradise. We probably can’t find such an image in ecological resources. Point being, we should be able to.

The hope I allude to above likely began somewhere in the mid-to-late-seventies. Forty years ago the ex-gang members who formed CHARAS planted the willows and lindens in La Plaza. Shortly thereafter, in my fantasy, the city, so emboldened by these renegade improvements, planted the honey locust to the right of the gate on Avenue C. This stately street tree rises nearly sixty feet today, casting a broad dappled shade across cement and pavement with it’s strong dark limbs contrasting light green leaflets which turn pumpkin orange in the fall. Profuse edible young green seedpods grow long and twisted, hardening and blackening as autumn approaches. By Halloween the canopy reminds me of a huge jack-o-lantern floating next to the garden. A dozen more such trees live on the blocks between 8th and 10th on C.

These honey badger arboreal beasts are particularly suited to harsh city conditions, not minding air pollution, droughty weather, compact soil, and salt spray. Their knobby trunk bases often flair out in a gnarled mass, filling tree wells to form a perfect lumpy rectangle. Furthermore, as legumes (the pea family) they are members of an elite clan able to siphon nitrogen locked in the air via a vast microbial symbiotic system, through nodules on their extensive root networks, gifting it all back to the soil in a continued cycling of nutrients for their fellow flora and fauna.

But alas, in the garden, they are weeds. They enjoy so much reproductive success that if we allowed them to go unchecked, La Plaza’s climax community would surely be dominated by this matrix species. Other weed trees would certainly compete in descending order of magnitude: white mulberry, common cottonwood, and tree of heaven to name the most notorious. For, the fertile upland and relatively mild climate we enjoy here in Manhattan almost always wants to evolve back to forest. And in our tiny deprived patch of it these woody weeds would eventually take over.

So what to do? How do we manage our succession? What do we say to these trees and this land? In our permaculture plan we designed fruit and nut orchards surrounded by a sort of savanna-like grass, perennial, and shrub landscape. So when you come across the pea green locust saplings, pull them out. Then either compost following Rita’s Rules or leave the biomasses right where you found them and know you are assisting in accelerating the return of much rich nitrogen into the soil. If one of these trees manages to escape detention and is too large to pull out, don’t fret. Coppice (prune the crap out of it and repeat above advice).

Oh, and pick up and toss out the thousands of seedpods littering the forest and grassland floors (Native Americans supposedly ground the hard seeds to make flour, so you could try that!).Your edible woodland and prairie plant friends will thank you for the nutrients and sunlight with lush and nutritious growth.

PS -- A lot of the information in this post came from this website, where you can totally geek out on permaculture knowledge.