Why I Don’t Want to Lose My ‘Ugly’ Snag

I never thought I could find joy in, much less love, a dead tree standing on my property, smack in the middle of otherwise pastoral views. But I not only love a dead tree, I’m distressed by the fact that it’s only mostly dead, which is to say, somewhat alive, and has begun a process of regeneration with a strong and upright leader.

The snag, being overtaken by opportunistic shoots.

I should cheer that leader – and the part of me fascinated by nature’s ability to recover and thrive should rejoice.  Instead I feel like renting a cherry picker and cutting off the top of it just to slow it down. Harsh I know, but like most good love stories, this one built slowly. I hate to see it ended.

It started unexpectedly. Three years ago, the loudest thundercrack I have ever experienced made us sit bolt upright in bed.  A quick sock-footed pad around the house put minds at rest that an ash tree had not fallen through the roof [again], and we went back to sleep.

The next morning, on my way to feed chickens, my attention was caught by something not quite right – one of the 90+ foot tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) was shimmering in the early morning sunlight and the reflection had caught my eyes.

Trees don’t shimmer, and I approached the tree a little confused. Gradually I realized that I was staring at the unnervingly muscle-like cambium layer of the tree, completely and utterly naked, and glistening with the nutrients and water that only 12 hours before had been racing to its canopy. From a height of about 15 feet all the way to the top, the bark had literally been blown off the tree. There was no other damage beyond a few stray branches on the ground.

The lightening bolt went all the way to the ground, but only blew the bark partially off from 15 ft to the ground, consequently two lower branches were able to survive and throw vertical shoots.

At first my reaction was one of sadness.  To see the sinews of the tree stripped of protection and to know that it was not dead but still struggling hit a chord.  We have lost untold ash trees in the last nine years to the ash borer – some expensively removed, some we have had removed, others threatening to fall when you least expect it during a woodland walk. With all those dangerous trees to be felled, the lightening had hit a healthy tulip poplar.  And there were no funds left to fell it.

To add insult to injury, the tulip poplar held a very strategic bit of river bank against the erosive powers of a natural swale that forms during high rains.  And to make things even just a little worse, it was the tree that centered the view when I looked out from the deck. We needed that tree. We wanted that tree.

The tulip poplar anchors an eroding bank against an active and naturally occurring swale.

The tree (to the far right in this photo) holds a vulnerable part of the stream bank during heavy rains, and occasional, 100 year flooding like this in 2021. For those of you who don’t know the story – that semi-submerged object in the center is my (then) yet-to-be-constructed greenhouse on a pallet that floated down the lawn and miraculously got hung up by roots.

Over the next year the tulip poplar lost most of its branches as windstorms came and went. Far away from the house or driveway, they were in little danger of hurting someone, and so it became a study in decay that I would stare at with my coffee in the morning, interested by the birds that were starting to take advantage of the clear perch – and the clearer view of the stream where they fished for crawdads and tiny fish.

Herons and kingfishers took turns – the kingfishers chasing each other from preferred perches, the herons regally weighing down a branch until a choice space was found in the stream below.  There was a barred owl one evening at dusk, hawks in the morning, and of course, the chattering and chasing of squirrels.

Gradually I began to warm to the place of the snag in the life of our property, seeing it not only as a touchstone for so many species in the surrounding woodland, but as garden art in the midst of so much spring and summer green.  By last year, its whitened, weathered form was as wished for and wanted as if I had pointed the lightning bolt at it myself.

And as I came to this surprising epiphany, I noticed a gradual rejuvenation – whips sprouting from a healthy base, one strong shoot in particular racing vertically along the ghostly silhouette of its mother.  The eroding bank was saved no doubt, but with a price.

Soon that guiding structure will disappear, lost in a rustle of foliage. The clear perch will be gone, my window into the secret ways and wars of wildlife darkened, but the lessons imparted to this gardener will remain: a little decay is a good thing – a necessary and miraculous event in the life of a garden.