Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Family Trees

On the south side, our house can barely breathe. It’s book-ended against a gray stucco owned by our friend, a Chinese-American lawyer with the bipartisan name of Sherman Lee. Sherman’s house begins a stairway of two- and three-story homes that rise from the sidewalk like slabs of Neapolitan ice cream: raspberry, orange sherbet, mint, vanilla.

To the north, subtract fog, power lines, and rooftops for a panoramic view. The Marin headlands set the stage. Against those blues, the onion dome of Holy Virgin gleams golden. Jade-green hills of the Legion of Honor recede in the background. In the distance, orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge pop against a cerulean sky.


This view would stir almost anyone but I miss the ancient acacia tree that was here when we first arrived.

The branches of the acacia spread to the right and left like a menorah, and its thick glossy leaves shaded and obscured the cluttered yard below our house and the apartment building on the corner. The highest limbs scraped and swayed below our porch windows, transforming that space into a tree house. On a first morning back from Kentucky in the summer I heard the scream of the power saws and opened my porch window to be head-to-head with a sturdy Hispanic tree-trimmer who was balanced in the upper branches.

He worked all day, and I raged. I cursed the sight of streets, gravel rooftops, and bleak interiors that were suddenly in my face. The tree's fate was out of my hands, and as I watched, each branch of the acacia fell. Finally the trunk was sawed flush with the ground.

In San Francisco, trees are loved and hated, and Friends of the Urban Forest will, for a nominal fee, plant the tree of your choice on the sidewalk. They’re responsible for rows of saplings all over the city. In spite of the ease of tree-acquisition, some residents resist. They don’t want the bother of watering during the dry months, or the trouble of raking leaves in the fall.

So some streets have many trees, and others have none. Twenty-first Avenue falls somewhere in the middle with a respectable row of trees on our side and slabs of bare gray concrete across the way.

We joined the effort by planting a tree of our own. Our uphill neighbor suggested that—-for consistency--we stick with the same species of that borders the house below. But there was never really a choice for us. It had to be a ginkgo.

The ginkgo was the tree of my childhood and the two ginkgos that first grew in Clinton had a mythic presence. The oldest was brought to Clinton from the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago by the chief horticulturist of the fair, a Clinton native whose name was John Samuels. The ancestors owned his rambling white frame house up the hill from my grandmother’s place and long after John was gone the front yard at the Samuels continued to be an expansive showplace for horticultural treasures, notably his great ginkgo.

The second Samuels ginkgo was directly across the street from our house, in impressive sentry to the left of the Fostyr sisters’ front door. This ginkgo was championed by Mom who--as a historian--delighted in its background. As a toddler I was taken across the street and instructed in the design of the fan shaped leaves. I was told that these masters of endurance might actually be male or female. I was schooled in the illustrious history of the ginkgo, and was allowed to cross the street and play in the magnificent shower of golden leaves that would usually fall to the ground in the space of one day.


When I left home I was always informed of the state of the Fostyr’s ginkgo....the unfolding of geometric foliage in the spring and the dramatic and unpredictable downpour of the leaves in October. In a way it was emblematic of my earliest education: the ginkgo provided living lessons in design and history-- studies that would shape my window on the world.

As an adult, my love of the species held fast and I became a Johnny Appleseed of ginkgo trees. As we renovated the Emma House in Clinton I dipped into the budget to buy a large ginkgo and planted it squarely in view of the dining room window. As it grew, my sons and their cousins inferred that the ginkgo was probably our family tree. the kids knew that the ginkgo was our family tree.

A few years later my apartment in Lexington was on Catalpa Avenue but in truth there were no catalpa trees, only a long line of ginkgos planted there by Henry Clay. Several were female trees that dropped foul-smelling fruit on the sidewalk. The medicinal properties of the persimmon-like orbs were lost on me, but I often saw elderly Asian women in hats of straw walking down Catalpa in the morning sunlight, bending to collect the fruit.

By this time the Fostyr sisters had died and their house in Clinton had been replaced by a new Methodist parsonage. A new minister rotated in about every five years, and each was faced with the prospect of dealing with the now-monstrous ginkgo and its offending fruit. Each minister postured and prayed for the demise of the tree, but my mom would not hear of it. If at any time the ginkgo’s future seemed uncertain Mother would quietly approach the minister and inform him of some facts he might have missed: the Samuels family, the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the great history of the species itself.

Finally the ginkgo across from our house did have to be removed. According to the Methodist minister who did the deed, the Fostyr’s ancient tree was thoroughly diseased, riddled alpha to omega with a deadly plight. I remember the day, the phone conversation with my Mother, and the resignation in her voice as she, too, listened to the screaming of the chain saws.

So....at street level here in San Francisco there is no longer an acacia, but we have planted a slender, slow-growing ginkgo. If we’re lucky it will be at the foot of the steps long after we’re gone. Perhaps some Asian or Russian toddler will notice a golden leaf on the ground. If that child is very fortunate, someone will--as my mother did-- delight in its symmetry, trace the fan-like lines of the leaves, and looking into the child’s eyes will smile and slowly say, “ginkgo, ginkgo.”
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drawings: Fan Leaves
micron 05 and 005 on paper