I hadn’t intended to visit that spot that day—not really, not consciously. But I ended up there, as I always seem to do on my walks through the city, at a place where something still lives that only I can see. The effect, in this case, was, as it always is, so entirely different from what I had half-expected to find when I turned the corner that coming up against it now, after 17 years, felt, as it always does, like slamming into something hard; as if a steel barrier had risen up from the street and I had banged into it. The impact registered as a constriction in my chest, a kind of claustrophobia, as I looked across and saw, above the tracks, instead of sky, the sky-reflecting facades of buildings; below the tracks, instead of the trunks of trees, the glass-fronted lobbies, apparently, of those same buildings; between, the tracks themselves almost hidden in scaffolding still up after years of construction. I kept thinking of what I remembered from before, the openness above and below the tracks; sky all around, unmitigated, unreflected, unblocked; views opening out toward the buildings of midtown on one side and the river and New Jersey on the other. Of course, I had not imagined, that day in 2002 when I first stood in this spot, that the elevated tracks would later become known as the High Line or that growing from the sidewalk and spreading under and around them, nearly hiding them, would no longer be the long green stems of an ugly, deformed, out-of-control Ailanthus altissima.
It happened that a friend from out of town was visiting, and we had made a plan to walk, earlier that day in 2019, down the High Line to check out the Whitney Museum at the south end. Nearly four years had passed since the Whitney had reopened at its new location on Gansevoort Street in the West Village and I still hadn’t gone, though my friend had. I had avoided this part of town during the construction of Hudson Yards, the massive development (still incomplete) through which the High Line—the elevated railroad track turned popular park and walking path—ran. It was a warmish April day and, after meeting at the 34th Street steps of the High Line, we immediately started walking south and talking. We had not seen each other for some months—perhaps even for a couple of years—and though we had not started out in life as close friends (having met through our wives), over the years we had discovered interests in common, and lately something had sprung up between us that made us especially curious about, and eager to discuss, the other’s point of view. Neither of us had walked the northern part of the High Line yet, nor had we seen Hudson Yards, which now rose in glassy splendor within the horseshoe curve of the tracks between 34th and 30th streets. Between discussing the new buildings and catching up with each other, our conversation jumped around at first, and it wasn’t until we had come around the curve and walked into the plaza outside 30 Hudson Yards, beside the new arts center called The Shed, that I asked my friend how he was doing—because three months earlier he had almost died.
I asked him that question just there, I think, because rising before us in the middle of the plaza, surrounded on three sides by tall buildings, was the beehive-shaped sculpture known as The Vessel, an M. C. Escher-like configuration of staircases, in a sort of brushed bronze, that rose improbably and strangely above us, between the blue-gray, glassy skyscrapers on either side. I was wondering if my friend—a mountain climber and bicyclist for as long as I had known him—would be up to climbing to the top of this structure after his heart attack. (Access to the top of the structure was later severely restricted after a series of suicides.) As it turned out, he said, though he was still on some drugs, he actually felt better than he had before, because two of his arteries had been half-clogged, and now, with the stents, he found he could do more and didn’t get so winded as before the heart attack. His recovery from what had been two surgeries had not been entirely unpleasant, he said, because he had been able to do a lot of reading and thinking, and figuring out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. What he had learned, he went on, in response to a question of mine, was not to be afraid of death for himself, because if he had died—as he would have if the paramedics had not administered CPR when he was still minutes away from the hospital (so vigorously that they had broken one of his ribs) he would not have known what had happened. He would have just slipped away. It was not to himself that his death would have mattered, he said, but to his family and his friends. It’s the other people who matter, he said, and the way he said it, so straightforwardly, looking at me there in the cool shade of the buildings, I found myself thinking, not of his death, which had been averted, but of that of someone even closer to me, which had not. I responded that I thought I knew what he was talking about, from the perspective of having lost Rachel. The doctors had assured us that, given the nature of her accident, our daughter would not have known what had happened to her—in one instant she would have been herself, in the next gone. Yet her death, at 21, had affected literally hundreds of people aside from us, her parents and brothers—and for us the repercussions were still being felt nine years later. My friend had known my daughter, so I felt comfortable saying this to him.
We continued talking like this for some minutes, standing in the shade of the tall buildings as people rushed past with cameras and strollers and guidebooks, and then my friend, who was wearing only a tweed jacket and a scarf, said, perhaps we should continue on, we’ll catch a chill standing here in this breeze. And it was only later, after the afternoon had ended and I was on the subway home, that I realized that we had forgotten all about climbing The Vessel, so absorbed had we been in talking; and I wondered if my friend, too, had realized, later, that we had not done what we had in some way been contemplating doing—the thing that one was expected to do at this point—but had, instead, turned away and continued south along the High Line. As I sat there in the strangely empty subway car hurtling toward Times Square, I realized that as we had turned away and continued south, we had passed directly over the place, on the north side of 30th Street, just east of 11th Avenue, where the Ailanthus had grown. And at that moment I had not given it a moment’s thought.
Thinking back on that walk, and how it ended later that afternoon, in that nearly empty subway car, I ask myself now, what is it about the loss of that Ailanthus that matters so much to me? It is not as if a tree is a person (just to get that out of the way). A tree is a large woody plant, and there are many of them in New York City—around seven million, according to recent estimates. What is it about the loss of this one that is so important to me that I would still be sitting here, at my desk in my apartment, four years later, puzzling about it, as I have been doing ever since that day? I am reminded, as I write these words, of a name someone once gave me that I long resisted, but that I have finally come to accept, and that gives, perhaps, an opening to some of the complicated feelings behind my confusion. It was a journalist who gave me the name: “tree person.” Being a tree person, in the eyes of this journalist, was a good thing; he identified as one himself, and his article, recounting a lovely morning we had spent driving around the parks and streets of New York City looking at trees, had seemed to confirm his belief in the nobility of this calling.
By implication of course, as I think most people would agree, a tree person is not the same as a tree hugger. All tree huggers are tree people, but not the other way around. Tree people can be loggers, foresters, naturalists, tree guides, dendrochronologists, or, like me, photographers. They can work for electrical utilities as well as for botanical gardens. “Tree hugger” is, in its current most frequent use, a pejorative term flung around by those with a financial interest in trees to cast a negative light on those who wish to protect them. It is a damning euphemism, like “welfare mother” or “snowflake”: a political term, in other words. And like those other political terms it has crept into the national vocabulary and done its work of poisoning attitudes and narrowing beliefs, so that now it goes beyond trees to stand for someone who opposes progress and puts the needs of the natural world above those of the human. Many people, of course, are happy to embrace the term “tree hugger,” because they are not afraid to be seen to have an emotional attachment to trees. In fact, they want to be seen to have one. The term is employed in some cases even—usually by politicians of one kind or another—as a public relations tool to temper otherwise hard-edged reputations. In these cases the term is habitually preceded by a “but also,” as in, “a realist but also a tree-hugger” (as if to be a tree-hugger is to be someone who lives in a world of fantasy). “Tree person,” though, has none of those connotations, either positive or negative or PR-connected. It is neutral, cool, factual, capable of new iterations and interpretations.
Still, for a long time, despite its neutrality, I resisted identifying even as a “tree person.” There seemed something narrowing, limiting, in allying oneself so closely with a single cause. After all, wasn’t I also a father-person, a husband-person, a photographer- person, a writer-person; someone involved with archaeology, technology, books, birds? Couldn’t I be a social-justice person, a world-peace person, a healthcare-for-all person? Why must I be identified with something so nice and seemingly innocuous as trees? Plus, in some ways, as I was only too well aware, my attitude toward trees was far from innocent. I like splitting firewood and burning it in fireplaces—preferably several fireplaces at once. I enjoy using my chainsaw—the roar of the engine, the acrid smell of the exhaust mingling with the sweetness of the sawdust as it comes flying out, the accurate placement of cuts so that the tree falls just as you planned it; the thud of the long, heavy trunk on the ground, the branches crackling around it. I am too hypocritical, I felt, to merit such an honest title, at the same time as I am too ambivalent to wish to be limited by it. And although I felt that caring for trees did, by its very nature if properly pursued, also require caring for one’s neighbors, and advocating for policies that would be for the benefit of people as well as of woody plants, the difficulty of establishing such a connection in a way that others could understand and accept eluded me.
It is with much the same bafflement that I sit brooding about the Ailanthus, a tree that even the most die-hard tree-huggers love to hate. For most people, the Ailanthus, or tree-of-heaven as it is also called, is a weed tree, an invasive species that takes root and grows quickly in places that people aren’t looking after: empty lots, forgotten cul-de-sacs, forest openings where power lines have been put up. Native to China, it was first brought to Philadelphia, according to E. S. Barnard in his New York City Trees: a Field Guide to the Metropolitan Area, by a horticulturist in 1784 as part of the complex global trade in exotic botanical specimens that reached a high point during the 18th century. The tree now grows wild, Barnard tells us, “from Canada to Argentina.” It is so adaptable, so quick to take hold, that it can flourish in the accumulated dust in the corners of abandoned balconies or in the darkness under sidewalk grates—or, in the case of the specimen that I saw and photographed one day in 2002—in a disused space under an elevated train track.
The Ailanthus is not a tree that many New Yorkers—even tree people—try to defend, not only because its voracious appetite for life tends to allow it to push out supposedly gentler native species, but because it is associated with a city out of control. In the book in which the species perhaps most famously appeared, Betty Smith’s 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the tree was already treated as a symbol of some kind of decline, a lost order, invasion even (in this case by immigrants). Today it is one that many New Yorkers associate with the 1970s, when subways were covered in graffiti, Central Park had lost most of its grass, blocks of the South Bronx had been reduced to rubble, 42nd Street was a gauntlet of strip parlors and triple-X movie theaters, and the city was defaulting on its loans. The city’s financial troubles steepened a decline in staffing at the Parks Department that had begun in the 1960s. Without sufficient foresters to maintain even Central Park’s trees, let alone those of Prospect or Pelham Bay or any of the city’s other large parks—and perhaps without the will to do so—the agency let nature go a bit. That was when the Ailanthus, stronger and quicker than its competitors, began thrusting its spiky leaves from cracks and crevices all over town. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t the threat of a return to the impecunious, Ailanthus-filled days of the 1970s that has continued to justify, in the minds of so many, the growth-oriented building frenzy that still dominates political talk in the city today.
The specimen that I photographed under the tracks in 2002—and included in my book in 2013, after the tree had been removed and the tracks renamed “The High Line”—had somehow managed to keep growing for some years when I first came upon it, pushing up through a pile of old tires behind a rusty fence. An orange steam pipe towered out of a brick structure beside it. A cage covered a rusty air-conditioner in the window of the structure, which had perhaps once housed an office. Graffiti covered the walls and weeds sprang from the cracks of this abandoned, under-the-tracks office. Somebody had recently stashed some personal items out front—a milk crate full of papers, a suitcase, a rectangular object covered in a dark sheet and a tubular one in brown paper. A jagged opening in the fence suggested that somebody climbed through and vanished under the tree on a regular basis. A TV antenna attached to the rail of the elevated tracks above suggested that somebody watched things under the tree. That somebody, in other words, had electricity there. That somebody, quite possibly, found the tree a congenial place to live.
A TV antenna suggested that somebody watched things under the tree. That somebody, in other words, had electricity there. That somebody, quite possibly, found the tree a congenial place to live.
The distance from the 34th Street subway station to the new Whitney museum is a little more than a mile, but because of the crowds trying to make their way up and down the narrow boardwalk on this spring morning, stopping at inconvenient points to photograph each other with New Jersey, or the Empire State Building, or the Freedom Tower, or all of midtown, or just some random building, in the background, it took nearly an hour for my friend and me, after finishing our conversation outside The Shed, to get to the museum. We were not in any particular hurry, and, exploring our mutual interest in cities and gardens, we ourselves kept stopping to observe a particular group of shrubs artfully angled out from a curve in the railroad tracks that remained, now surrounded by fertile topsoil, in their original places under and alongside the boardwalk, or to notice the backhoes excavating in a triangle beneath us, as if to create the basement for a pocket building in the only unclaimed bit of land along the raised park. It was then, as we ambled south, that I finally remembered “my” Ailanthus, and started telling my friend about the time, 17 years before, that I had found and photographed it, and about how, eight months after taking my picture, I had gone back to photograph it again in a different light and found that it was gone—along with the milk crate, the suitcase, the other objects, and the TV antenna on the railing above. I had taken a picture anyway, I told my friend, of the empty spot, but, as always happens when a tree has been removed, the location had lost its center and my photograph, when I looked at it on the contact sheet a few days later, seemed wrong. The office and the smokestack looked lost without the tree between them. Happening to speak with the owner of a woodworking shop in the building across the street, I learned that the tree had been cut down a month or so before. When I asked why, the woodworker—who still had sawdust on his apron and in his hair, and who spoke with an Italian accent, said, with a flip of his hand that seemed to indicate that this was the sort of thing that usually happened, and he really hadn’t had the time to look into it, and was only speculating—that he thought the tree had been cut down to clean up the block. And so, I told my friend, as we pushed our way along the High Line, constantly interrupted by people stopping in our path, that it was not for another nine years—well after the High Line had begun opening in sections, and the little building containing the woodworking shop had been knocked down and replaced by a corner of the tall glassy building that stands there now, and I was doing research for the book I published in 2013, New York City of Trees—that I exchanged some emails with some of the staff of the High Line and learned the real story of the Ailanthus. One of the gardeners, in particular, told me that he remembered the tree very well, that it was not a single tree but a grove of individual trees massed together. The trees had been removed, he said, because of their classification as an invasive exotic species, and the landscaping plan for the High Line called only for native plantings. But what, I asked, about the idea of recreating the look of the elevated tracks during their years of abandonment? One of the main plants growing along it, I reminded him (as I had seen in photographs of the unrenovated High Line by the photographer Joel Sternfeld) had been that very invasive exotic species. To this e-mail another staff member of the High Line, Danya Sherman, responded. Reproducing the effect of Ailanthus without actually planting it, she wrote, had been accomplished by planting sumac, a native species whose leaves look very much like those of the Ailanthus. And so, I said now to my friend as we continued south along the High Line at our slow pace, those sumac you see over there are supposed to remind you of the missing Ailanthus. I said this with a certain irony, because the Ailanthus I remembered was on such an entirely different scale than the pruned little sumacs before us, whose prim delicacy only seemed to accentuate the voracious grandeur of the tree I remembered. Of course my friend could not see the contrast, but I could tell that he caught the irony. My comment led, at any rate, to the start of another, related conversation, which brought us to the bottom of the High Line and into the Whitney; and as we were both by this point quite hungry, we quickly agreed to go straight up to the restaurant on the eighth floor, where there was a balcony, my friend remembered, where we could eat and continue talking.
Self-identification and public identification are two different things, and rarely do they happen simultaneously. In my case, self-identification as a tree person—someone who admitted to himself that he did notice trees, that he looked for them, and that he even felt emotions about them—came one day in 1996 at an exhibit—strangely enough at the “old” Whitney Museum at 74th Street and Madison Avenue—called NYNY City of Ambition. Taking as her leading idea that by the beginning of the twentieth century, for American artists, “the splendor of the skyscraper had superseded nature” as a subject for art, the curator of the blockbuster show, Elisabeth Sussman, had culled from the Whitney’s vast collection of art from that century, and from the hoards of a few private collectors, the paintings, sculptures, and photographs of artists who, as she wrote in the catalogue, had “plucked from the city’s visual cacophony those singular images that collectively describe urban life.” The eponymous central image of the exhibit was Alfred Steiglitz’s smoky, dark image of buildings pushing into a gloomy sky over a river where tugboats lurked, “a skyline,” Sussman wrote, “of smoke-spurting minarets, a city of power, wealth, and luxury.” I remember being curious, as I walked through the massive exhibit, which, as I recall, filled all five floors of the building, to see if any of the images chosen by the curator would correspond to my own image of the city. But not only did I fail to find such an angle, but the city represented by the vast array of pictures and objects turned out, disappointingly, to be a quite narrow and obvious (if popular) view of New York—an idea that represented a city perhaps parallel to the one I thought I lived in, but incomplete and barren, lacking the openness and greenness, the smells and textures and sounds, that I knew also to be there; and though as I walked through the galleries I noted how the curator had certainly done a thorough job finding sources to support her argument, I felt quite sure—though I could not name them and could only speculate about their existence—that she must deliberately have passed over quite a few other works whose inclusion in the show would have complicated her argument and presented a more nuanced and, to me at least, believable view of New York.
At the time I went to that show at the Whitney I had been working for eight years for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. I worked at the Arsenal, the agency’s headquarters at 64th Street and 5th Avenue in Central Park, and because of that building’s central position in a citywide network of borough offices, district headquarters, parks, playgrounds, and recreation centers, it had, in relation to the rest of the city, somewhat the connection of a major international airport to the world. Just as, through the concourses of the airport, as you sit waiting for a flight, you can watch people from all over the planet, in their particular outfits, speaking their different languages, pass by, so as you sat in the Arsenal Gallery, writing, say, a grant proposal with a co-worker from Queens, you could watch the commissioner from Staten Island walk by in his jacket and tie alongside a park ranger from the Bronx in her green uniform and cowboy hat, and a recreation chief from Brooklyn, in a button-down shirt with the top two buttons undone, attending a meeting of his counterparts from the other boroughs, also in button-down shirts, but of different colors, with either both or just one of the top buttons undone, while a member of a tree pruning crew, with sawdust still clinging to her chaps, stopped in to drop off the keys to a vehicle requiring maintenance. Adding to this feeling of centrality in an interconnected universe of parks was the fact that it was from the Arsenal that I would often drive, in a bright green truck or SUV, to visit one of the thousands of properties under the jurisdiction of the agency spread around every corner of the city.
In those days (and it is not much different today) when an image of the city formed in my mind, I saw it, like those three-dimensional plans of Paris with the Eiffel Tower at their center, or of Rome with the Tiber as a kind of snaky organizing principle in the middle, spread beneath me as if from a tower high over the Arsenal; and this map, as it appeared in my mind, was a spotty three-colored arrangement of blue, gray, and green. Because I had studied the histories of some of the green parts, and knew that many of the trees of the city were older than the buildings that had sprung up around them, and how even in recent years highway construction had divided neighborhoods and open spaces in arbitrary ways having nothing to do with topography or ethnography, it was the green and the blue parts that seemed to me to be the real, authentic sectors of the plan, and the gray, which constituted streets and buildings and bridges and airports, and the vast parking lots of the superstores that had begun springing up here and there, as unreal, even ephemeral additions to a place with a much older natural structure.
When I found myself at that Whitney exhibit in 1996, it was as if somebody were holding up a facsimile of that bird’s-eye map, only with the green and the blue parts erased. Everything in this view of the city—the view presented by the exhibit—was gray. Landscapes consisted of buildings, rows and layers of tenements, skyscrapers—sometimes still in the process of construction—rearing up to the sky, rooftops stretching back to ever-higher rooftops, abstractions of the street grid, groupings of buildings under construction. Waterways were just another shade of gray. Two Georgia O’Keeffes, nominally of the East River, overwhelmed that watercourse in a smoky grid of rooftops and black smokestacks. Howard Cook’s menacing woodcut Skyscraper and his etching Times Square Sector presented the city as a geometric puzzle in black-and-white, as did Berenice Abbott’s photograph of buildings at night, The Night View, and—especially—Thurman Rotan’s photomontage of a completed Rockefeller Center, Skyscrapers, in which identical buildings climbed back from each other to the sky. Edward Hopper’s Apartment Houses, East River and Queensboro Bridge allowed a few trees to slip in beneath monolithic architectural forms, but even here nature felt like background, like the unfinished parts of a work-in-progress. Aside from Berenice Abbott’s, the other photographs in the show depicted New York as a place of success or degrading failure. WeeGee’s stark nocturnal catalogues of murder victims, Diane Arbus’s renditions of outcasts and freaks, and Paul Strand’s depictions of anonymous office workers passing into shadowed alleys showed the uncomfortable side-effects of a celebration of sameness and uniformity that the construction of ever-taller buildings seemed to entail. This was the flip side, the show seemed to be saying, of what the director of the Whitney at that time, David A. Ross, called, in his Foreward to the exhibition catalogue, “ambition as an idealized source of energy and inspiration.” As the show seemed to have it, one person’s energy and inspiration is another person’s downfall. Like Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York” (which I almost seem to remember piped through the Whitney as I walked from gallery to gallery), the exhibition celebrated a view of New York as a place where the purpose of life was to become “king of the hill, top of the heap.” “If I can make it there,” this organization of pictures seemed to be saying, over and over, “I’ll make it anywhere.” Or you won’t. New York in this view was a sort of “making it” machine, which each person entered for the sole purpose of striving to outdo every other person, and came out either made, partially made, or unmade. The realization that New York, for me, was not such a process or function, not a place with such preordained outcomes, but something else—a place of memory and experience and discovery, a place of trees that had been growing for longer than I had been around, a place to live, a place to call home—gave me, as I walked through that show at the old Whitney, a feeling of claustrophobia not very different from what I experienced this afternoon 23 years later when I gazed on the place where the Ailanthus had grown.
It was shortly after that museum visit, passing through the South Bronx on one of my drives from the Arsenal, that I saw, out of the corner of my eye, in a playground, a park house reflected in a large puddle. Something about the combination drew me to a stop. I pulled the truck into the playground, got out, and stared at the reflection, which presented, I decided, the longer I looked at it, some of the symmetry and grace of the Taj Mahal as it reflects in its pools on a sunny morning in Agra. The day was cloudy and the park house was in poor condition and locked. A couple of garbage bags bulged under the window, waiting for someone to take them away. Instead of the carefully tended short conifers, mimicking minarets, that line the reflecting pools in front of the Taj, untended elms or lindens bunched in from either side of the park house, whose roof was missing some of its slates. As I took out my camera to photograph the building in the puddle I felt something in me turn. The picture, I thought, as I clicked the shutter, was not the sort that would have appeared in “City of Ambition.” It had nothing to do with massive development projects. Nor did it document the victims of that ambition that David Ross, the Whitney director, had celebrated in his Forward as “the primal force that … defines New York.”
It was a picture, this one, that showed a city where rain fell and puddles formed on concrete, transforming a barren stretch of gray into a reflecting pool; a city where, as if in counterpoint to the ever-taller buildings, the city had erected these squat, ugly, but strong and functional park houses. Drab and institutional, smelling of the decades of ammonia that workers with mops had spread across their floors, these structures were still, more than half a century after their construction, the only unchanging pieces of architecture in most playgrounds, containing such useful amenities as toilets, sinks, closets for maintenance equipment, and, in many cases, a desk for a park manager. Identical in appearance, mostly built in the 1930s and 1940s when depression-era public works programs had created a park building boom never seen before or since, the buildings were, and still are, probably, the most common architectural element to be seen around the five boroughs of New York City, linking parents and toddlers in Queens to parents and toddlers in Brooklyn and Staten Island, and giving everyone a sense of connection to an organized system designed to promote the health and physical well-being of citizens. This one was beginning to fall apart, of course, as things do even in the City of Ambition. Somebody might or might not find a place in their budget to renovate it. But I thought, as I stood there, about how this particular park house, made momentarily grand by its doubling in the puddle, may have been built in what had once been an open space, a field or a pasture or some other unpeopled plot where the city had been able to claim ownership and construct a playground, and how this plot had been part of a stretch of land that had once been all trees, back before any of these buildings had been erected, and that the trees growing here now, these elms, were almost an afterthought compared to the truly majestic ones that had once grown here, the chestnuts and oaks and white pines and tulip trees and sycamores that had cast this stretch of land into deep shade in the days before Europeans like me had arrived with our ambition and our guns. And as I stood there I felt the turning within me come fully around, and I found myself smiling, which is a strange thing to do when standing in a flooded playground in the Bronx at 10 am of a cloudy morning, because I suddenly knew what I would like to do next in my life, how to express what it was I was seeing in this park house in the puddle. I would make a book, with photographs and text, that would be an answer to the City of Ambition. I would call it City of Trees.
The subject my friend and I were talking about after looking at the sumacs on the High Line, and which we resumed over sandwiches on the eighth floor terrace of the Whitney, was gardens. One of the main passions of his life is a large, entirely organic vegetable garden and orchard at his house in the Rhone Valley where he lives with his family in France. I have always had a garden myself, but mine is a slap-dash, makeshift patch of raised beds and weeds inside a flimsy wire enclosure behind our house upstate, nothing like the verdant couple of acres where my friend’s abundant, succulent crops seem to shoot up toward the sun more of their own accord than from any effort on his part. Prompted, at any rate I think, by the irony, different from the one I had been enjoying about the sumac, of the Ailanthus being imported to the U.S. at the end of the eighteenth century as a rare and valuable exotic only to become, by the end of the twentieth, what most people consider an invasive weed tree, my friend began talking of other ironies and paradoxes embedded in gardens, where the most ordinary plants turn out to have fraught histories of colonialism and capitalist trade, and where what most people consider weeds and pests can be looked at in a different way and used to promote the fertility and productivity of the soil. He began explaining how in his garden in France he had started a program, not entirely successful yet in some ways, but which he was excited about and was going to keep experimenting with, in which he worked with the weeds and pests, not to eliminate them but to try to encourage them, as he put it, to help him out. What it really gets down to, he said, is the amount of digging you choose to do. Different organisms, he said—and he began listing various bacteria, fungi, and archaea—live at different levels in the soil. Turning over more than the top two inches of earth in your garden reduces their number when you actually want, he said, to encourage as many as possible. Left to themselves, he explained, those microscopic creatures and their predators further up the food chain keep the soil loose and alive.
Every tree in a city, struggling for space in its own circumstances, is different, and every one is a living mirror of the place where it grows.
We were still on the High Line then, and I found myself wondering, as we passed the neat shrubs and small trees and grasses that the gardeners had planted in cocoa-shell mulch, what kinds of organisms might live under that mulch and whether the High Line staff followed a similar no-dig approach in maintaining them. Thinking then of my own garden, I asked my friend whether not turning over the soil—which I did religiously every year—wouldn’t also encourage weeds, and he immediately came back at me about how questionable the very word weed is, and about how some of the so-called weeds we talk about are actually helpful plants that could help fix the pH balance of soils and encourage the very types of microorganisms he’d been talking about. For the past hundred and fifty years, he went on, as horticulture has become more commercialized and agriculture more industrialized, the regular use of weed-killers, insecticides, and non-organic fertilizers has tended to sterilize the soils where those microorganisms could otherwise thrive. The position of humans in relation to nature has in too many ways become one of dominance and oppression rather than one of cooperation, and this is as true, my friend said, in gardens as it is in agribusinesses and international relations. We sat on this for awhile (we were on the terrace of the Whitney now, eating our sandwiches) and then my friend continued, but a different paradigm does seem possible, at least with gardens, in which a garden is made in cooperation with nature rather than in opposition to it, and he started to describe in more detail his own efforts, often unsuccessful, to welcome every form of life—even slugs, which he was currently battling—into his garden, and make the garden as much about all those other ways of being (by not-digging, by mulching, and by growing plants especially for them) as it was about the harvestable crops that were his garden’s apparent purpose. He was just beginning to tell me more about this inspiring and, it seemed to me, quixotic program when an approaching helicopter that we had been vaguely watching began hovering over the museum balcony where we sat, so that my friend had to start shouting to make himself heard, and we had no choice but to lapse into silence for a while, as I thought of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in the museum, along the High Line, and along Washington Street with its cafes and restaurants below having to shout at each other or even cover their ears and fall back into stupefaction because of the painfully loud machine overhead. Did the people inside the helicopter have any idea how many of us they were affecting with their painfully loud sound? Did they care? Eventually the helicopter veered off, but our conversation, darkened perhaps by the interruption, reverted to that earlier topic of human dominance and oppression and the ways they manifest themselves in the landscape and in life and stayed there for a while before itself veering off, as conversations will, in another direction entirely.
It was not until some time later, after we had gone to an exhibit two floors down of art based on computer systems and algorithms, and had gone further downstairs and out to the front of the museum, and my friend, explaining that he had to go back uptown to his father-in-law’s to say goodbye to his wife before he flew back to France in the morning, had said goodbye and gotten into a taxi and sped off—it was not until I suddenly found myself alone in front of the museum that something else my friend had said struck me. I had pointed out that in many ways his ideas about people’s relationship to gardens could also pertain to their relationship to trees, especially to trees in a city, and I began listing the many ways that mature trees, left alone to grow wherever they are at their own pace, make cities better places to live, and the many circumstances that too often lead to their premature removal. That was when my friend said, the efforts of a few people to fashion the city according to their own desires, and usually for their own profit, always come into conflict with the need of the larger community for those things you list.
Remembering those simple, straightforward words as I stood on the front steps I found myself thinking again of the Ailanthus I had photographed in 2002, and of something else trees do in a city, which I had not thought to include on my list for my friend, that make them antithetical to the kinds of dominance and control we had been talking about. Only I, and perhaps a few others such as the older gardeners on the High Line (if any were left), remembered the ugly tree, and perhaps only I cared enough about it to keep thinking about it. In the history of changes in the city, trees like that—chance, opportunistic weed trees whose every leaf breathes insurrection against the urban grid—had always been in the weakest position. Not even the Parks Department, which oversaw street trees and required a permit from anyone wanting to cut one down, would have questioned the removal of that one. Yet what trees like that Ailanthus represented was a quality that I could only think of as the local. No matter what its species, a tree can only grow in one place, and it can only grow as the restrictions of that place allow. It looks for space and air, light and water, and takes them as it finds them. Every tree in a city, struggling for space in its own circumstances, is different, and every one is a living mirror of the place where it grows. It defines and particularizes the place, and is part of what makes the place local. People need the local, because it defines and particularizes them. Without it they are like the saddest cases in that exhibit I had seen so many years before at the old Whitney, the lost souls in Edward Tooker’s The Subway (1950), who wander an endless labyrinth of corridors and staircases and gates and turnstiles, never getting anywhere and always worried. As I stood there, somewhat irresolutely, on the front steps of the Whitney, feeling suddenly bereft in the absence of my friend and besieged by this depressing image from the long-ago exhibit, my mind turned back to Hudson Yards, where he and I had stood talking just a couple of hours before.
Perhaps I am too much a creature of the 1970s, a product of apartments where the spiky leaves of Ailanthus rose green and sparrow-filled outside my window, but those massive towers with their sky-reflecting glass and their wind and their blankness are not places I can imagine living. As I saw them then in my mind’s eye, so tall and sleekly designed, the buildings looked as if they had been created as part of the cardboard set of a science fiction movie, or the fantastic structures of rides at an amusement park: buildings whose forms could only be appreciated from a distance. Thinking of them, and of that ugly, long-gone tree that, among so much else, they had replaced, I decided (if only to top off my misery) to walk back uptown and pay a visit to the spot where the tree had grown. I started walking out Gansevoort Street from the front of the museum, but, perhaps because of the beer I had had at lunch, or because I hadn’t yet adjusted to the solitude after the sudden removal of my friend, my mind was elsewhere, and I started walking south on Washington Street. It was not until I had covered a full block, and looked up to see the Freedom Tower gleaming in the mid-afternoon sun far ahead of me, that I realized my mistake and turned around and retraced my steps north.
Benjamin Swett is a writer and photographer whose books include Route 22 and New York City of Trees, which won the 2013 New York City Book Award for Photography. His essay collection The Picture not Taken will be published by New York Review Books in fall 2024.