Christine Gelineau

I’m not someone much given to taking home stray animals—we’ve had five rescue dogs and an untold number of adopted cats over the years, but not unplanned-for animal rescues—and we’ve been very strict about taking in stray horses—we DO look gift horses in the mouth. That said, I seem constitutionally unable to pass up the chance for plant rescue. Just a couple of examples. The mountain laurel that looks for all the world to have expired I understand I must move from its place of prominence in the perennial garden but whereas sensible people would add the carcass to the brush pile, I search out some out-of-plain sight but fertile spot to give the laurel one more chance. We had a beloved flowering crab that grew perilously close to the power lines to our house. For years we laboriously used a telescopic pole tree pruner to keep the offending branches out of harm’s way but then came the two summers in a row Long COVID laid me low and precluded the gymnastics of overhead tree pruning with an extension pole. In those two summers the tree interlocked its branches with the lines like hands in prayer. Sadly, I accepted the inevitable. Once the tree was down, the roots were dragged out with heavy equipment, an astonishingly long network of roots like a woody river delta being drawn up out of the ground. To assuage the loss of the crab, a hydrangea bush trained to tree shape went into that spot—“Limelight” will give me blooms but has no ability to grow tall enough to cause problems. What I hadn’t planned for is that the flowering crab refused to go gentle into that good night. In the myriad places the left-behind roots sent up a hopeful little shoot, I was right there trying to rescue it. My husband did what he could to mow over the ones coming up in the lawn before I saw them but enough tenacious little trees sprouted in the “safe” zone around the hydrangea that I ran out of promising sites to move them to and found myself pressing slender little crabapple shoots on friends and neighbors like a tree version of zucchini season. The botanical urgency I refer to in “September Song” draws me. Don’t we need to support that level of desire and determination?