brooklyn farms

I’ve always favored a wildish yard. If a weed is beautiful I might let it grow, and this year just about anything vigorous was able to amake a run for it in our backyard as weeks went by without yardwork. Yesterday afternoon I pruned back a particularly sprawling cherry tomato plant which was all over one of the pear trees. Thinned the thick stand of amaranth – they were a dense patch of volunteer sprouts that I hoped would be sunflowers in the bed by the back fence – the biggest of which are 7-8′ high with giant feathery plumes of maroon seeds.

But I draw the line at the Ailanthus. I appreciated it more when I lived in Detroit, I’ll give it extreme toughness and ability to grow anywhere, but I can’t tolerate a single sprout in our yard. When we bought our place there were two big Ailanthus in the backyard, one definitely dead one, and a 40′er in the back corner which seemed maybe dead. All winter long the biggest one in the back corner was a towering claw littered with tattered plastic bags, a real spectre of death. But lo an behold by late spring it leafed out at the ends of all the branches and I understood why people sometimes call it the ghetto palm. So it’s ugly brittle soft wood tree that’s going to die in a few years and topple over somewhere that also shades the richest bed of soil in the backyard. It cost us a lot to get rid of those trees but now we have excellent sunlight in the backyard and many of the sproutlings that take advantage of the space and the energy are ailanthus.

Pulling them out roots and all is the only way to go. Somehow they stem, after resisting mightily for a while, breaks off above the rootline to grow another day. There’s a nutty oily smell that comes from a broken ailanthus. I hate that smell, but I can remember it at any moment and I don’t think it’s going away any time soon.