The neighborhood bonsai exhibit

I moved my temperate trees to a restaurant patio eight months ago. Here's how they're doing.

Now is the time of year to snake through the residential blocks of Jackson Heights. Everyone with a row house or duplex is making the absolute most of their limited gardens. Squash vines and ripe figs everywhere you turn. Is it technically theft if the bitter melon you pluck is hanging over the sidewalk?

I’d like to live in one of those houses some day. Nothing fancy, just a place of my own with a little garden in front and a larger one in the rear. Oh, the pollinators I could plant! And I could get my temperate trees back.

Long time readers may remember how my outdoor trees were evicted from my fire escape and, after some hijinks, relocated to a lovely neighborhood restaurant called The Queensboro. Meanwhile I’ve turned my apartment into a tropical growing den, which has yielded its own rewards, but my heart really belongs to temperates species like maples and redwoods. It’s been eight months—three seasons—since the relocation, and about a year since those trees were evicted.

Honestly, I miss having them around! I used to spend sleepless nights looking out on the trees. Now, if I want to sit with a tree for a few days and ponder its future, I have to dig it out from its planter and carry it home, a messy business in this weather. That hasn’t stopped me from doing it, but the procedure is more “divorced dad picking up his kids” than I’d like.

Though I think I’ve gained more than I’ve lost.

The trees would say so. All the trees made it through winter intact, insulated by the surrounding soil of the planters they’re dug into. The two trees that died soon after would have done so regardless of where they were, which is to say, I probably would have killed them anyway. This new location gets far more sunlight than I could hope for on my fire escape. My conifers look especially grateful; prolonged shade would have starved them slowly. At first we were worried about theft or vandalism. Apart from occasional litter, though, they’re untouched. Of course that could change at any time, however the neighborhood’s most dangerous vandals—the squirrels—haven’t so much as disturbed a branch. Restaurant dumpsters make a more tempting target.

Now that it’s summer I head over to water once a day. It’s a short walk, less than a mile round trip, that offers a few minutes to take in the neighborhood street trees and garden beds, and remember that all this growth couldn’t care less about humans like me. My neighbor-friend Matt and I turn many of these watering trips into mental health constitutionals. They’re annoyingly restorative.

Back when I moved the trees over to The Queensboro, I figured these trips would yield similar benefits to walking a dog. That’s turned out to be doubly true. Fresh air and sunlight, yes, but also time set aside to regard the life of something unlike and besides myself. Instead of considering my dog’s favorite sniff spots, I think about what to do with my larch.

All the restaurant staff love the whole shtick, that some guy from the neighborhood comes over to water plants he installed. They’re full of questions: how are the trees doing, what’s this one? On occasion I hear a server talking about them to a customer seated close by. The daily greetings and fist-bumps accumulate. There’s a Sesame Street magic to it.

The Queensboro’s patio and planters are the result of covid policies allowing restaurants to extend outdoor seating to adjoining parking spaces. It’s a nice one, not a plywood shed, and beyond my measly collection is overflowing with grape and hop vines, aromatic herbs, and ornamental flowers of every color. My whole arrangement with the restaurant could only have happened in this time, at this place, with these people. I wonder what other similarly improbable arrangements lie dormant in this city. What opportunities a little anarchy could shake loose.

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Tree reading

Poet Zeina Hashem Beck on uprooting oneself yet again and the role of street trees in a sense of place. [New Lines]

Good blog of trees swallowing their surroundings. [Hungry Trees]