Japanese zelkova
The Japanese zelkova is related to the American elm and has been introduced as an alternative due to its resistance to Dutch elm disease. Zelkova is also tolerant of harsh urban conditions, has attractive fall color and casts deep shade, making it a popular street tree. There’s hardly a bad thing you can say about it except that I sometimes see it strangling itself with its own roots.
Desperate Characters
Paula Fox’s novel Desperate Characters is the portrait of a marriage set in Boerum Hill during a time of personal and social breakdown. Fox’s fictional characters grapple with themselves and each other at the real Pacific Street address where this young tree now grows.
In his introduction to the book’s 1999 reissue, Jonathan Franzen compares the feeling of reading and re-reading the novel to that of being deeply connected to a spouse, with all the fraught communication and unease such familiarity can bring. He loves the book; it horrifies him. It’s a pinnacle of 20th century realist fiction; a single word choice grates.
His comments made me reflect on trees’ experience. The endless repetition of the seasons; the pain of having to grow where you’re rooted, whether you like it or not, and bear injury without being able to leave. What does that do to a tree? What does it do to a person?
