Relative Something

I am loath to admit what is daily becoming more apparent. The maple tree that I have been gushing about for the last seven years, transplanted from our woods as a sapling in the fall of 2016, is not showing any sign of life this spring.

We keep hoping beyond hope that the stunted little buds on the branches are just delayed, but the little branch I snapped off a few days ago didn’t offer much hope, with little in the way of green life showing.

My inner pessimist has me thinking my cocky decision to begin annually measuring the circumference of the trunk to track its growth brought on this outcome.  What I don’t understand, among the many things I don’t understand, is how and why this is occurring so suddenly. I have watched a lot of trees die in my lifetime, and they usually show plenty of signs they are on the way out.

This is how that maple tree looked ten months ago:

The dang willow tree in the small paddock that I cut almost to a stump and has no reason to have any real future health has sprouted a surprising amount of new branches. If this maple is failing, couldn’t it at the very least pop out a few little attempts to get some nourishment from the sun?

In the spring of 2017, we draped a sheet over the delicate new transplant to protect it from freezing temperatures.

I am so very sad and disappointed. More importantly, I am at a loss as to what happened and what we might have been able to do differently to prevent this sudden failure. When we can muster the mental fortitude to take invasive steps to inspect the roots, we would hope to learn if there is rot. Did it get too much water? Did the lack of snow and hard, hard freezes last winter have this impact?

There are no signs of insect activity or any other visible fungus. All I have is the perception of full leaves last summer, a normal fall change of color and dropping of leaves, and tiny buds that stunted and stopped this spring. It feels like going from all to none.

It sucks. I’m heartsick over it. At this point, I’m not sure I even want to bother trying a fifth time for a tree in the center of the labyrinth garden.

Maybe it’s just dormant and will make a second attempt at leafing out. I could try cutting off the limbs like I did the willow tree and see if that makes it sprout new growth.

Instead, I plan to do nothing. It is what it is. I plan to sink my oodles of tree love into all the other wonderful volunteers around our property that we didn’t need to transplant, but now are being nurtured by protectively clearing around them and frequently monitoring their well-being.

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