The Tree That Snuck In

I met a friend I hadn’t seen for a while.

He was taking his bicycle to his garden, a little patch of perhaps thirty square metres. He is more philosopher than gardener. He seems willing to let the garden have some say in what the next season will bring.

There are raspberries. There are plums.

And there is a tree.

The tree took root among the raspberries some years ago. Nobody planted it. Apparently nobody particularly objected either. There was room enough, and so it stayed.

Now it is perhaps five metres tall.

My friend thinks it is taking too much water from the raspberries. It has grown so high that the plums have become difficult to reach.

“How old is it?” I asked. “Fifteen years?”

“Maybe only twelve.”

Twelve years.

It occurred to me that this five-metre tree had somehow snuck into the garden.

Not quickly. Not under cover of darkness. More like a fox getting into the chicken coop at a rate of a few centimetres a week.

For twelve years.

Perhaps at first it asked almost nothing.

A little patch of earth. Some rain. A share of sunlight.

There was no reason to refuse.

Then it did what trees do when conditions permit.

It flourished.

And now my friend says he will have to kill it.

There was something in the way he said this that sounded almost like betrayal. As though hospitality had been offered in good faith and the tree had taken advantage.

Of course the tree hadn’t betrayed anyone.

It had merely pursued its tree-ness with considerable success.

But thirty square metres is thirty square metres.

Water taken by the tree is water unavailable to the raspberries. A canopy creates shade. Roots occupy ground. Branches make the plums harder to reach.

The garden that afforded the tree’s flourishing has been changed by its flourishing.

And now the gardener has to decide.

Perhaps that is one of the difficulties of hospitality.

We can welcome something without knowing what its welcome will eventually require of everything else.

Sometimes there is room.

Sometimes making room for one thing begins to take the room from another.

And sometimes a decision that once seemed generous has been growing quietly for twelve years before its consequences become five metres tall.

I don’t know what my friend will do with the tree.

We didn’t settle the question.

He had to go.

The raspberries needed watering.