Though this is a large garden, many of our favorite things are planted near to hand. Lilacs and roses cluster beneath one bedroom window, and our oldest Stewartia grows beneath the other. Our one precious Ilex opaca crowds against the foundation of the living room below one window, sheltered both by the winter shade thrown by the house and the warmth of the basement wall. The bright yellow culms of Phyllostachys aureosulcata ‘Spectabilis’ enjoy a similar protection and brush against each other, creating what the Japanese call the sound of silence. The beautiful soft pink hybrid magnolia called ‘Leonard Messel’ overhangs the kitchen door. And across the face of the house are three deciduous hollies, Ilex verticillata, which are as old as it is and have grown into muscular shapes like small trees.
Because our house is small, that leaves only one aspect, out the upstairs bathroom window, and it is dominated by one of our most treasured small trees, important enough to share a place in our affections even with the Stewartia or the magnolia. The tree is Sorbus alnifolia, the Alder-leaved or Korean Mountain Ash, and we see it every hour of the day, every day of the year. Best of all, we look into its crown, close to its leaves and flowers and fruit and somber winter bark, not as if the tree stood out in the garden but is almost part of the room we are in.
We were in pursuit of Sorbus alnifolia from our first year here. We had read Donald Wyman’s enthusiastic description of it in his Trees for American Gardens. In those days, we had room to plant trees and we intended to plant a great many. We then found a living specimen at The Arnold Arboretum in Boston, and our enthusiasm was fixed. Sorbus alnifolia was definitely on our list.
But despite Wyman’s praise, the tree was little known then and rare in nurseries. Even Weston Nurseries in Hopkinton, Mass., which supplied us so many wonderful trees and shrubs in the beginning, did not list it. That seemed odd, for there was little question of its hardiness (as, for example, there was about Stewartia pseudocamelia, on which we took a chance anyway.) Sorbus alnifolia originates in a very cold part of Korea, and is rated as hardy all the way to Zone 3. Eventually, however, we found the tree offered by Wayside Gardens in South Carolina, which made a specialty of the rare and unusual, always at a hefty price. We bought the tree from them, of course, though years would pass before the wisdom of that purchase came clear. What arrived that spring at the post office was just a little sapling barely two feet tall and as thin as a pencil. However, its very smallness was a piece of luck, because of where we intended to plant it.
Our garden was taking shape in the shadow of an old New England hardwood forest. Many of the trees, mostly ash, beech, yellow birch and maple, were perhaps a hundred years old or more, but because they had grown close together for all their lives, they rose straight and tall, with no lower branches anywhere closer to ground than thirty or forty feet. The woods needed to be brought to ground, needed the understory that is often lacking in old woods this far north. But their interlacing root zones made it impossible to establish well-grown small trees with large root masses of their own. A sapling, however, could be tucked in easily among those roots, and so we planted our sorbus almost at the foot of a great sugar maple that towered above the ash’s puny self. We really do not remember giving it any special care those first years, either because memory has failed us or – more likely – because it didn’t need much, and grew quickly. Now, and for a long time, it seems always to have been a stately tree perhaps thirty feet tall, with a trunk measuring thirteen inches in diameter and a wide-spreading crown still comfortably below its much older companion.
The two have existed in perfect harmony, but they never seem so suited to each other as in October, when both are dressed in autumnal blaze. Against the scarlet orange of the maple the ash’s simple, toothed leaves turn from darkest green to butter yellow and then to orange, then a tawny brown. A spectacular display of fruit accompanies this steady change of foliage as October advances. Each of thousands of flowers pretty white flowers arranged in puffs that covered the tree in May will have formed into corymbs of coral fruit shadowed red beneath a powdery, dusty bloom. In most years, the fruit is not with us for long, since a host of birds – jays, robins, cardinals and chickadees – descend on it, making its crown even more alive with color. If the path flight of the robins lies directly over us, they can strip it bare in a week. But if not, the much less voracious birds find something for themselves all winter long, even in the shriveled, dark brown raisins of fruit that may cling almost until spring. And even in winter the tree is beautiful, and somehow noble, its thick trunk supporting a crown of secondary branches. Both the trunk and older branches are smooth and gray but dotted over with straw-colored lenticils, forming a pattern like the skin of a snake.
Over the years, so much in a garden happens by accident, or with a vague hope that somehow things will fill the expectation formed only in the mind. But in any older garden, there may be successes so striking that the gardener himself cannot imagine having foreseen them, and can take no credit for what seems essentially an unexpected gift, a happy accident that occurred beyond his best-laid plans and wishes. Our Sorbus alnifolia seems that to us now.
