Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia

15. Elm

73 & 15. Elm the tips of daffodils and the spidery leaves of crocus and snowdrops are poking up in the bed on the side of the house. This is a good season for pruning.I know because LockeWoodfin, an arborist, told me this on Thursday. Today is Tuesday. There are seasons in the city. I know people who don’t believe this. I went to an exhibit of photographs at the museum a couple of weeks ago,and the photographer, a man who has lived for years in Philadelphia, said he didn’t see the changing seasons until he lived in France. Or was it the Southwest? A traditionally spectacular place—the south of France, the American Southwest. It’s important, I think, to see seasons wherever you live. I’m attached to the notion of seasons and bound by the calendar. It’s February, the edge of spring here, although the calendar tells me I have almost another month until it’s official. The cardinal singing his spring song on the top of a lanky bare tree in the azalea garden knows that the winter has turned a corner. The rowers in their long shiny boats pulling toward the mouth of the Schuylkill know this too; they’ve been on the water for about a week now. When Locke Woodfin came to look at our three elm trees he told me that they were Siberian elms. Finally I have a specific name for them. The elms leafed out give us a dappled street. A light breeze lifts their delicate leaves and fluffs them down again. I love their mossy green limbs, their tiny round seeds that carry their own packet of potting soil so they sprout with the least moisture on the 74 springettsbury street in the spring. Our familiar pigeons peck at the transparent samaras the size of a nickel, scattered on the black pavement like confetti. I like the elms’ slow leafing out, so slow I fear for their health all through spring. Their leaves in the summer are thick and serrated. In the fall they turn a deep gold and shine this way and that in the warm October sun. In rain they’re shimmery trees, resilient and old. They bend their branches and touch the roof or the telephone line in the front of the house or the wooden edge of the deck. I watched a yellow-bellied sapsucker drill several large holes in the elm in front of the house a few days ago. She was tapping the trees for sap. She sipped the sweet liquid as it collected on the rim of each hole she had drilled. Sometimes great limbs fall off onto the street. And that’s what Scott is afraid of, a limb crashing onto someone’s car or worse yet, someone’s head. “We’re lucky to have these trees in our neighborhood,” Locke Woodfin said. He lives around the corner on Woodstock Street. “My neighbors don’t like the elms,” I told him.“Mary Robinson wants the city to cut hers down.” “They won’t do it,”he said.“Tell her you’ll pull up the sidewalk and build a garden box around it like this one,” he said. “Are you kidding,” Scott said when I told him later.“With everything else we have to do?” Fairmont Park Commission owns the trees, but we’re responsible for pruning. In Penn’s time Lord Baltimore had his men mark the old trees south of here with his crest just to make sureWilliam Penn knew where his land ended and Lord Baltimore’s began. In September 1683 Penn’s agent in Pennsylvania wrote to him in England: elm 75 Most Excellent Sir There is a report that the Lord Baltimore is arrived at the head of the (Chesapeake) Bay & that he has run a line piercing into part of your lands, having particularly surveyed John Darby’s plantation, and cut his (coat of) arms on several remarkable trees. Our trees are healthy, Locke told me. “Look at all the good bud development.They just sap out like that from old wounds.” He gave me three estimates for pruning, all too expensive for us. We’ll probably go with the cheapest, prune the branches over the house and take off some weight on the branch that extends onto the deck. “I’d cut that one...