This summer, a mulberry tree took life in my backyard, so quickly that it seemed that one week there was nothing and the next week there was magically a tree. “Oh,” I said to it while I was cleaning the yard one morning. “Where’d you come from?” It moved in the breeze, jingling its new leaves subtly like tiny paper bells.
I have two other relentless trees that grow in unwanted places in my tiny backyard. One grows under my porch, bucking all the rules I know about plants needing space, sun, and water. The other tree grows in the fence between me and my neighbor’s yard. It bulges up, pushing the wood and wire out of its way. Every year I cut them both back with my shears, slicing through their bark and their light green innards in an act that has always felt necessary but surprisingly violent as I do it. Though I am a life-loving, generally peaceful human, the tree’s life was so automatically secondary to me compared to the fence or the other factors of human existence on that tiny plot of land, which had been, a short 25 years ago, nothing but fields of wild grass and hedgerows. “Not here,” I would tell the trees as I cut them back.
Now I stood next to the newest tree and cocked my head at it, impressed by its quickness, by its odd choice of earth, there on the edge of a suburban plot where fence meets mulch. It was already so green and lush, its arm-like branches reaching upwards and outwards, some of them straight through the wire fence. I shook my head and went in for my shears but reemerged a few minutes later without them. Instead I had my phone, on which I had, a couple weeks earlier, uploaded an app that helped me identify plants and trees. I had just finished reading Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which had inspired me to start paying attention to trees, to their secretly dynamic lives. And though this little tree was a nuisance, I was curious about what kind it was. It was a mulberry tree, one of the top seven most important trees for birds, according to Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology. I knelt down next to it and traced the jagged edges of one of its leaves with my fingers while I listened to a cat bird call from the bushes of my neighbor’s yard. It was, I thought, planted here by the birds who had mixed the wild seeds into suburbia’s neatly organized feeders. We had invited the mulberry when we invited the birds. How strange that we chip away the wild from our neat lives and then beckon it back.
And here it was, the wild, pushing against my fence. So I went back in for my shears. And I reemerged moments later without them again. This time I brought my computer, where I googled “Mulberry Tree” and began reading. Mulberry trees would, often, produce delicious fruit, good for jams or pies. They were hearty trees, so hearty that they would break open sidewalks and roads, blast through sewer pipes, wrap themselves around porch foundations. I looked at my old wire fence and imagined the little mulberry growing wider and taller, breaking the fence, splintering its wood, reaching upward and outward. Insistent.
It didn’t belong here. Wildness cannot live in suburban fences. And yet I never went back in for the shears. I walk out every morning and look at the tree, a tree I have become tempted to call mine, as if it can be owned, like a fence, like a yard, like a house. But like a moment, like a breath, it belongs to nobody. Not even the birds who brought it to me. As I stand next to it and breathe, it draws in carbon through its leaves and into the soil through its roots.
Carbon dioxide is a gas released into the atmosphere when we breathe it out. Other carbon-based gases are released into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels, when we frack, when animals digest foods, and more. Carbon holds heat. Therefore when there is a lot of carbon gases in the atmosphere, more heat will be trapped in the atmosphere. The more heat is trapped, the hotter our planet becomes. And the hotter our planet becomes, the less it operates in a way that makes it good for human life.
Trees like the mulberry, though, trap carbon, pull it out of the air and into the ground, into their leaves. Scientists agree that planting more trees (many more trees) could be one way we could slow the warming of our planet and give human life more time. Mulberries, it turns out, are especially good at taking carbon dioxide out of the air. Just a small group of these trees could remove, from the atmosphere, the carbon-based greenhouse gases made by the average car in a year. They can enrich soil so that it is less prone to flooding. This means that communities that will be more and more vulnerable to flooding can use trees, like this mulberry, to protect themselves.
The mulberry in my yard has grown despite the lawnmowers, the fence, the mulch, and me. It is a piece of our lost wildness, the thing we all have tried so hard to prune back, push away, keep out. And yet it returns, again and again, pushing at our boundaries. It reminds us of where we come from and where we're going. That making room for it may save us more than fences or neatness ever could.
The truth is that I don’t know what this tree is going to do. If it will die trying to grow in this confined space. But I’ve decided to let it be, to let it soak up some of my carbon, and remind me of the places inside of me that are still wild, parts of me that still long to interrupt borders and boundaries, to fracture the fixtures of modern life that tame, flatten, isolate, abuse, and commodify.
Sometimes I trick myself into believing we’re all so stuck in our ways, stuck in the way of life defined by structures and policies larger than we are, that we can’t break free, can’t change the dangerous trajectory we’re all on. But the mulberry reminds me that opportunities to change, to transition, to break through, are all around us. They are growing even now as you read this, in our backyards, in tiny moments of reflections, in us.
Some people believe that if we listen, trees will talk to us. If this mulberry is telling me anything, it’s that I need to reevaluate what I need and what I don’t. The tree under the porch, which turns out to be another mulberry tree, is already growing back, bushy green-covered branches pushing out through the lattice, willing to bend itself totally sideways to get access to the sun, to life. “Hey there,” I tell it. “You’re not going to give up, are you?” And I think, to hell with it. For now, I’ll just let it grow.
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