Maackia 038: A hard winter

I’m Nathan Langley and this is Maackia, a monthly newsletter looking forward to spring.

I don’t know where my affection for ginkgo trees comes from. I think, like a lot of things, it started at the UBC Botanical Garden. The main entrance to the garden has a mature ginkgo next to the boardwalk. It is simply stunning in the fall. But otherwise, it doesn’t call out for attention unless you pause and are curious about the surrounding plants when you buy your ticket.

I don’t remember what year I bought my ginkgo (sometime between 2013 and 2016), but it was at the University of Guelph Arboretum’s yearly plant sale. It was very small — growing in a two gallon pot.

I didn’t have a place to plant it when I lived in Guelph. I couldn’t take the risk my landlord wasn’t going to see it and cut it down or rip it out of the ground. The ginkgo didn’t mind, though. It was happy to take its time growing. While it was constrained within the pot, I made sure to do the usual things to make its confinement bearable. It lived like this until I moved to Sudbury in late 2018.

In 2019, I found it a nice spot at the front corner of the house. Not too hot, not too cold. It was out of the way from anything that could potentially damage it, while still being in a prominent spot when you looked at the house from the road. I could easily visualize the stunning tree it would become in the decades ahead.

Despite being out of the pot and in the ground, it struggled to get established. It wasn’t until the last few years that it showed any real visible growth above ground. I figured it was just taking its time. I know I was, too. Sudbury is very different from Guelph (which was very, very different from BC).

Again, for whatever reason, the ginkgo grew in importance over the years. When I commissioned my neighbour down the road to create a logo for Gardens by Nathan, she picked up on my affection for the ginkgo during our initial discussions. It became the subtle detail of the logo. A ginkgo fruit, germinating, with the heart of a tree waiting to grow.

I couldn’t imagine creating such a logo. But now that it is here, I can’t imagine anything else. A sign of the magic within the creative process when it is done right.

This winter has been hard. It is now the beginning of April and there is still, easily, three feet or more of frozen snow blanketing the yard. At its peak, the snow banks were just over five feet tall.

As things began to melt this week, I noticed the damage on my small trees. There was just too much snow this year. As the freeze / thaw cycle finally began, the shrinking snow / ice grabbed ahold of the lower branches on the trees and pulled.

I am not used to this kind of weather. I did not grow up with freezing rainstorms and mountains of snow. So while I struggled to keep the rest of the property in shape, my trees were slowly being ripped apart by the weather. Heartbreaking.

I know that they will likely be ok. Or maybe they won’t. But whatever happens, it won’t be from a lack of trying. The small wounds should heal over. They are small enough. They just need time.

I admire trees for their stubbornness. When something negative happens to them that affects their growth, they don’t complain. They don’t blame the world around them or simply fall over and die. They figure out where the sun is relative to their new position and get on with growing as strong as they possibly can for as long as they possibly can. They produce their offspring like nothing had happened, and protect them as they establish. They don’t dwell on something they had no control over.

My job is to not give up despite the damage. The ginkgo will look a little weird for a while. That’s fine. I just need to keep it watered, and clean up the wounds as best I can so it can get on with healing and growing. Assuming, of course, that there isn’t some catastrophic damage waiting for me that I can’t see (Schrödinger’s snow pile, if you will).

But first the snow has to disappear.