Daniel Mason
>New Life from ruins
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| Chris Payne’s “Asylum” @ Guernica |
Daniel Mason on the trees and plants that flourish after a city is bombed @ Lapham’s Quarterly.
Early last summer I found myself in negotiation with my landlady over the loquat tree outside our bedroom window. According to our neighbor, the tree, which rises from a six-inch gap between the wall and the driveway, was imperiling cars with its fruit and power lines with its branches. My landlady wanted to cut it down. I didn’t. The tree wraps the entire northwest corner of the apartment in a dark green canopy, transforming the bedroom into a kind of glassed-in treehouse from which we can look in upon bird’s-nests and conferences of squirrels with the kind of intimacy reserved for a nature documentary. In the late spring, we can reach out and pick its fruit.
Of course, my neighbor’s contention was understandable. No one had planted the loquat. It was an escapee from another garden, strictly speaking a “weed,” and a big one at that. Left unchecked, its roots would buckle the driveway, its limbs burst the windows. Already, in high winds, the branches screeched menacingly across the glass. In the dusty cracks between the concrete, seedlings would germinate, grow.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Whether or not my neighbor had such dramatic images in mind, I don’t know. But the struggle between city and nature is an old conceit. One has but to look to the oaks growing on Caspar David Friedrich’s ruined monasteries or the grass that “o’erspreads” the fallen city of Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” to see how plants have classically been understood as the definition of the city’s demise. When the great fifth-century Chinese poet Bao Zhao wrote with grief of the fallen city of Guangling, he titled his famous Fu, or rhapsody, the “Wu-cheng,” words often translated in anthologies as “ruined city” but which literally means one that is “overgrown.”
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