- Goldy | The Stranger
Young trees were planted along East Pine Street between 18th and 19th a while back, and this winter one of them was taken down either in an accident or a senseless act of vandalism, leaving nothing but a barren two-foot splinter left bleakly sticking up out of the earth.
Yesterday, I noticed that it had leafed out.
I obviously wasn’t the only one to be taken aback by this remarkable feat of survival. Someone had lovingly enclosed the “tree” in a tomato cage, I suppose in an effort to protect its tender remaining shoot of green from further damage.
I guess the proper thing to do to ensure that East Pine is properly wooded decades hence would be to replace this not-quite-dead tree with a new one, but I sure hope it’s given an opportunity to survive and thrive, and not just as a curiosity (although it would be worth it just for that). I’ve always thought of urban trees, with all they have to put up with, as symbols of both the resiliency of nature and of the cities in which they grow, and I can’t think of a better example than this splinter of a tree that refuses to die.