Fruitful

One week was warm and the next was not. One Sunday afternoon in April, we biked in shorts and t-shirts. The next afternoon, we shivered in puffer jackets and winter hats underneath our rain jackets. On Tuesday, it snowed.

Although the humans in the house were asking when it would finally be spring, the sugar maple tree in our backyard was not confused.

While we were raking leaves in the fall, she prepared dainty, hidden clusters of yellow flowers behind barely transparent bud scales. The temperatures dipped and the snow fell (and melted and fell and melted), yet her still unseen buds survived. Then, a dance of warming temperatures and lengthening days and flowing sap signalled it was their time. Buds burst with drooping clusters dotted with pollen and numerous enough to cast dappled shade onto the muddy lawn.

The flowers on the oak trees in my neighbourhood swayed with their own pale clusters of blossoms. Norway maples produced lime green bunches pretty enough to gather for an indoor bouquet. Cherry trees clothed themselves in pink, while crab apples and purple locust followed a few weeks later and a few shades darker.

But around the time we finally swapped hoodies and rain jackets for t-shirts, their show was over. Browned clumps of dried petals strewn across the lawn were ours to clean up.

Now that summer is here, we are seeing the fruit of the trees’ months of effort. My daughters toss samaras in the air and watch them helicopter to the ground. They fill their pockets with acorns, ask if crab apples are edible, and gather mulberries to leave in piles for the birds.

In the nine years I’ve watched my backyard maple weather the seasons, I have never seen so much fruit. I’m sure the branches droop just a little more than they did last year when there was hardly a samara to be found, and I’m convinced her leaves are smaller than usual too.

Confused by this sudden burst of fruitfulness, I turn to Google. Is my tree dying? One last hurrah before she gives up for good? Something unusual about this spring’s weather? Is she worried it won’t be enough if she doesn't give it everything she has?

Google calls it masting, and this year is a fruitful one.

In a mast year, a tree produces more flowers and more fruit than usual. An individual tree doesn’t decide it’s a mast year on its own. Instead, there’s synchronicity; trees of the same species undertake a mast year together, perhaps to increase the likelihood of pollination or overwhelm seed predators. Perhaps to make sure there will be enough.

Although it’s never been proven, one theory suggests a stressed tree is a fruitful tree. Another cites the absence of a late spring freeze that would have damaged tender blossoms as the precursor to a good season of fruit. No one is really sure, but somehow the trees know.

However, abundance does not come without a price tag. Stress on branches. A smaller leaf canopy. Less sap the following spring. There’s always a cost to fruitfulness.

The image of fruitfulness that I see out my kitchen window is one of weighted branches, months of preparation, no guarantee on returns, and no certainty that there will even be enough.

There are no white washed tombs or awards. Winning score cards and bank account balances and lists of accomplishments are absent. The tree doesn’t care about milestones or praise or even about what I think about the piles of spent blossoms. She does what she needs to do. Year after year. When one season demands more of her than another. Without a guarantee of success. And I think she's getting something right.

_____________________________________________

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Enough".

SOURCES

https://bygl.osu.edu/node/1776

https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/RappCrone2015%20preprint.pdf