SIMPLE LIFE
Death of a Green Dragon A gardener’s bittersweet reminder of life’s impermanence
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ast month, I returned from my first trip since the start of the pandemic to discover a baffling mystery at home. The leaves of a beautiful Green Dragon Japanese maple I’d raised from a mere seedling appeared to suddenly be dying. Arching gracefully over the side of the driveway, the rare seven-foot beauty was the star of my garden. It had never been more vibrant than the day I departed for a week out West, lush and green with lots of bright spring growth. But suddenly, inexplicably, those delicate new leaves were limp and withering. A friend who knows his ornamental trees pointed out that a freakish, late-season cold snap might be the culprit. The leaves of nearby hydrangea bushes were also severely burned, but were already showing signs of recovery. “I think you should simply leave it alone. Give the tree water and maybe a little spring fertilizer and let things take their course,” he said. “Nature has a way of healing her own.” His theory seemed plausible. I’ve built and maintained enough gardens in my time to know that nature always holds the upper hand. Sometimes unlikely resurrections happen when you least expect them. So I waited and watered, trying to push the thought of losing my spectacular Green Dragon out of my mind. Perhaps by some miracle it would come back to life. As I went about other tasks in the garden — mulching and weeding perennial beds, transplanting ostrich and woodland ferns to my new shade garden — I thought about how the sudden death of a spring pig elicited both intense grief and something of a personal epiphany for writer E. B. White, inspiring one of his most affecting essays in 1948. Following a struggle of several days to heal his mysteriously
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ailing young pig — such an ordeal blurs the passage of time, the author expressed — White, accompanied by his morbidly curious dachshund, Fred, walked out one evening to check on the patient, hoping for the best. Of this, he wrote: “When I went down, before going to bed, he lay stretched in the yard a few feet from the door. I knelt, saw that he was dead, and left him there: his face had a mild look, expressive neither of deep peace nor of deep suffering, although I think he had suffered a good deal.” The young pig was buried near White’s favorite spot in the apple orchard, leaving his owner surprised by the potency of his own grief. “The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig,” White recounts. “He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.” Life, of course, is full of unexpected compensations. It’s possible that the grief White suffered with the loss of his pig was the literary world’s gain. Four years later, the author crafted a tale of a barn spider that saves a charming young pig, Wilbur, from slaughter by crafting upbeat messages in her web. It became an instant American classic, and Charlotte’s Web continues to rank among the most beloved children’s books of all time. I don’t know if a failed effort to save a spring pig bought “in blossom time” is anything like trying to save a young Japanese maple I’d raised from a seedling, but the sadness of its sudden loss combined with a palpable sense that I’d somehow failed my tree followed me around like Fred the dachshund for weeks, a reminder of life’s mystery and bittersweet impermanence. It didn’t help matters, I suppose, that I couldn’t even bring myself to dig up the deceased tree and cart it out to the curb for the weekly refuse crew. At this writing, as lush summer green explodes all around, the beloved tree stands like a monument to my botanical
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by JIM DODSON
