Letter From the Desert: Mesquite tree
That’s the photo I took of the mesquite tree a few days before we closed on the house. The lady who sold the place to us planted it as a tiny seedling in 1985 or so, and it grew slowly but steadily in the way mesquites do until its roots found their way into the septic tank. Or at least to its subterranean outflow.
It was the biggest mesquite I have ever seen. I was charmed.
And I could have seen it coming. The tree was absurdly top-heavy. There were horizontal branches ten inches thick 20 feet off the ground. They crossed and recrossed other branches. With any other tree I would have climbed during the first cool week and done some artful reshaping with my cherished, 40-year-old Japanese pruning saws. I would have removed as many of the crossing branches as I could. I would have “drop-crotched” the tree overall: a hideous term than basically means pruning back the heavy branches to a strategically chosen and less vigorous side branch. I would have lightened the top heaviness overall and probably given the tree another few decades of life, another couple dozen seasons of holding up oriole nests and making bushels-full of delicious pods.
I didn’t do that. Have you seen the thorns on a honey mesquite? Even on a small tree they are formidable and abundant. On this tree? Four-inch spikes were not uncommon. There were no comfortable places for a mammal my size to perch anywhere in that tree.
So about a month and a half ago our southernly neighbor got our attention in the morning. He let us know that the fence between us needed some attention. A giant tree had landed on it.
Even fallen over, the thing was still 20 feet high. I did some hurried sawing-off of branches in what I hoped was a strategic manner, but it soon became obvious that even the sharpest of Japanese handheld pruning saws was not equal to the task.
This is a small town, so it took only a little time to find someone with tools appropriate to the job, and he was covetous enough about a ton or so of mesquite wood that he offered to do the job for free. The tools appropriate to the job turned out to be a couple of large chainsaws, a backhoe, a ten-yard trailer, and two other workers over three roughly consecutive weekends.
They did a remarkable job, and the random twigs and small branches they left behind would be sufficient to cold-smoke a great white shark, were one inclined to do such a thing.
A beloved tree down. I am feeling sanguine about the loss. It is a bit off-brand for the public persona that I carefully cultivate, but I have killed thousands of trees in my time. Most of them were coast live oaks, mostly planted by Steller’s jays, few of them more than four inches tall. They were basically weeds in my clients’ azalea beds back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Every single one had the potential to become a centuries-old matriarch in the Bay Area hills, outliving the azaleas, and the houses where the azalea planters lived, and possibly the asphalt in the nearby streets.
I plant trees as well. Fifty years ago or more I planted silver maples. I pulled them as seedlings from the eavestroughs on our garage. They had sprouted there in a rich compost of decayed leaves and detritus accumulated in the years I had been ignoring my father’s requests to clean the gutters. I think I planted a dozen seedlings that day. I have not been back to visit for 25 years, but from what Google Street View tells me, one of them was still alive as of last year. Silver maples have fallen out of favor as urban trees, as they grow quickly, which generally means brittle wood. They also shed millions of seeds, all of which find inconvenient places to sprout. They invade septic tanks and sewer lines. They break up sidewalks and foundations. They are not well-behaved trees.
I imagine visiting the place, walking up to the survivor and placing my hands on its trunk, having a moment of communion with this 60-foot tree that I held in my hands as a small seedling. And then I imagine being confronted with a bill by the current homeowner for decades’ worth of damage. So I stay on this side of the country instead.
It seems odd that one of my silver maples from the early 1970s could have outlasted this mesquite.
The mesquite was by no means the only tree here. One of the first things I did on moving to this place in 2020 was to order three velvet mesquites in 15-gallon containers and plant them out. They are all taller than me now. As is the screwbean I planted the following year from a gallon pot. In the summer of 2020 I visted an ironwood grove south of here and collected about a cup of seeds. They all germinated. I planted most of them in 15-gallon pots; two runty stragglers went directly into the ground. Two months later, after a ferocious hot spell, the potted ironwoods had all succumbed to the elements. The runty stragglers are not yet taller than I am, but they will be by this time next year. And then there are the palo verdes of four different species, one of them the spectacular Desert Museum hybrid. There were a few tamarisks on the fenceline when we moved in, and I spent the better part of that first summer killing them. I removed about an inch of salt-poisoned soil once the tamarisks were gone. Doing so, I found a tiny, tortured honey mesquite seedling that had just barely hung on beneath the tamarisks. It too is now taller than me.
No lack of trees here, in other words. Nonetheless, I will miss that big mesquite. Despite the fact that there are at least a half dozen of its offspring growing in one neglected corner of the yard or another. We’ve had visitors to that tree ranging from verdins and house finches to sharp-shinned hawks and kestrels. At least four generations of orioles have launched from its branches while we’ve been here.
And yet, I look at the space the tree left behind, and I start thinking about what kind of tree I’m going to plant to take its place, and it makes me uncomplicatedly happy.
You might find a couple recent episodes of 90 Miles from Needles interesting. In the most recent one I talk about keeping yourself safe in the heat this summer. In the episode before that I talk to my friend Daniel Leivas, agricultural director of the Chemehuevi tribe, as he gives me a tour of the tribal farm.
As always, thanks for reading. About five percent of readers of Letters From the Desert have joined the ranks of paying subscribers: if we can bump that up to 20 percent I could do this for a living. So here’s some incentive: