Norway maple heads for the wood pile, leaves lessons

Last week I bid farewell to a beautiful mistake. The Norway maple tree just outside our back door was but a tender sapling when we first moved into our house nearly 40 years ago. Young and dumb, I saw the backyard of my small city lot as a wilderness in need of a conqueror. I laid low all manner of wonderful and carefully cultivated vegetation that had outgrown its space, as my predecessors had slowly lost their ability to keep up with things.

In clearing space for a future filled with swing sets, volleyball nets and a campfire pit, I sacrificed the best of what my yard had to offer. I had no idea what I was losing.

Then there were the things I saved. I spared a chest-high black walnut tree in the far corner of the yard, and it flourished — so much so, in fact, I’ve had to march my garden a few feet further away each summer to stay clear of the tree’s toxic juglone halo.

My sister, who lives next door, has her own issues with the shadow cast by the now 50-foot-tall walnut factory. (The neighborhood squirrels, however, thank me through four seasons for my contribution toward their food and shelter.)

Another keeper was a small black cherry I transplanted from the backyard to the front. It’s now one of the tallest trees in the neighborhood and generously spatters the sidewalks with fruit each August just as school begins, staining crisp new sneakers a deep purple in the process.

Then there’s that Norway maple. It topped only eyeball level when I decreed it a keeper, figuring it would grow to shade our patio a bit. That it did, and then some, ultimately consuming an enormous amount of sunlight in both my own yard and my sister’s place across the fence. It also filled our gutters with vibrant lime-green flowers each spring, bushels of paired “helicopter seeds” or samaras each summer, and piles of yellow-orange leaves each fall.

Champions of native plants will quickly point out the Norway maple also is a problematic invasive across the eastern half of the continent as well, but invasive trees were the last thing on my mind as a freshly minted homeowner.

Yet, with all that tree’s negatives, I still loved to lie underneath it and stare up through its 60 feet of vertical habitat and marvel over my small part in its success.

The tree didn’t take long to die. It started with a bark split during the freeze and thaw of an up-and-down springtime a few years ago, and by last fall the extent of its all-out decline was obvious. There was no saving it. Its soul is now remanded to the firewood pile. Maybe I’ll plant a sugar maple in its place.

If you have comments on this column or questions about the natural world, write The Rail Trail Naturalist, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email jlorson@alonovus.com. You also can follow along on Instagram @railtrailnaturalist.