Don’t Tell John Ashcroft About This

Posted on July 21, 2002 in Folly Watch Plants

I do wish trees wouldn’t involve me in their sex lives. Something out by the falls is blooming and dropping loads of heavy pollen on my truck. We went out with a friend the other night. She got out of the truck, looked at it, and said “Oh, it’s GREEN.” The yellow dust paradoxically darkens the paint so that it looks nearly black. The hood’s littered with tiny pieces of flowers. If it were cooler, I am sure that I could make out the paw prints of a raccoon or the resident striped skunk in the floral grime. Recently moved trucks make great beds for critters as any cat will tell you.

The estrus cycles of the trees in the vicinity don’t come all at one time. They stagger themselves so that sometimes I have a few weeks when I don’t have to wash the truck at all. Then the male trees start to lust for the females. The eucalypts, the pines, the willows, and the live oaks all begin spraying the air with their sperm in the hopes that the wind will bring it to a lovely lady tree and they will have children by her. The mess isn’t just confined to the mating. Eventually the she-flowers fall off and swell up into nuts and berries.

The ones I hate the most are the purple plums. There’s a large one right in the front of my house, leaning precipitously toward the street. You can’t round the corner on the sidewalk if you are more than 4′ 10″ high because one of its branches is set to decapitate. I didn’t set there. It’s one of the plants that belong to those thin little strips of parkland maintained by the condo owners association. I’ve considered murdering it with a copper nail, but then I am sure I’d have a dead tree out in my front yard for a couple of years before hard times hit and someone chopped it down for its firewood. The purple plum tree is evil. It drops bombs. Inedible pomes no bigger than my thumbnail that stain the sidewalk a sickly magenta in the early autumn. I can look down from my desk and see the stains of many previous years underneath one of them. Not all of them simply fall to the ground and go splat. Some get picked before their ripeness and used as ammunition in one of the flower wars the kids like to instigate against one another. Others get kicked well away from the source to spots where they get pressed to the ground by a foot. Now and then, one of them manages to trip someone. The only birth control for the purple plums is to chop them down and replace them. But that is like the dread you feel when an unliked neighbor moves out: could the next one be worse? As my neighbor Kris likes to say “The evil you know is better than the one you don’t.”

I’d better stop now. I have a terrible vision. Norman Mailer once said that he vaguely felt that he had caused the Manson Family murders by imagining a similar psychotic commune while he was working on Why Are We in Vietnam? Far too often I have made a sarcastic comment about the intentions of the Right only to see them actually do some of the things that I thought were possible only in satire. And worse. I am suddenly chilled by the thought of John Ashcroft moving around the Tidal Basin with a chain saw, executing the cherry trees for lewd and lacivious acts performed in the presence of minors. Forget I said this. Pray that the lunatic doesn’t think to do it.