THE WEEPING CHERRY TREE

I love weeping Cherry Trees. The trees have delicate branches that hang almost to the ground with beautiful green leaves. Every spring the woody vines are filled with beautiful pink cherry blossoms and the fragrance stops you in your tracks. Although these grafted hybrid trees that would never grow randomly along a roadside or in a forest glade I still wanted one in my yard.

A couple of years ago we purchased one of these man made trees. This year we noticed that the delicate vines have taken on the properties of the tree it was grafted onto. The branches have become thick and are trying to grow upward. They never quite make it so they grow up and then down and then up, resembling a road winding up a mountainside. A branch from the original tree has broken free of the graft and threatens to overtake the delicate tree. In an effort to save the tree we have taken ropes and tied the branches down so they will stop their sporadic upward growth pattern. Next we cut out the branch from the original tree. This was all in vain. The branches will not be tamed and are becoming very thick. There are now 3 branches from the original tree that have broken free. There are cherry leaves on some branches and larger leaves from the grafted tree on the other branches. Now we have a very funny looking tree.

I guess there are some lessons to be learned here. Maybe forcing a tree to be what it isn’t doesn’t work. What about people? Can we change them by sheer will? I know it doesn’t work with teenagers and I hate when someone wants to tell me how to change. No matter, I have given up on my tree and as I see it have two options. The first is to let it be what ever it wants and the other is to turn it into something useful – firewood. Then I will be free to find a tree that wants to be what I want it to be.