Wider effects of the tree

 

When I planted the wild cherry tree over my mother’s grave, I thought I was marking a place.

Humans like places. A stone. A tree. A neat understanding that someone is here and not there.

Nature, however, tends to view such arrangements as helpful suggestions rather than binding agreements.

Her tree grew.

Trees do what trees do, which is to say they conduct a slow and extremely thorough conversation with the soil. Roots wander through the earth meeting minerals, worms, forgotten bottle caps, and eventually whatever remains of the person you loved.

In time, the tree and my mother reached an arrangement.

Now, every spring, Mum’s tree blossoms. When it does, the universe bends a little. Not dramatically. The laws of physics remain broadly intact. But small adjustments occur. Churches unexpectedly develop tea-making capabilities. Cake appears in places that had previously only specialised in solemnity. My son, whose diabetes has a very firm opinion about the availability of sugar and which occasionally demands sugar with the urgency of a parliamentary vote, somehow finds sweetness exactly when it’s needed.

His nanna always had excellent timing with food.

But the cherry tree has ambitions beyond that.

Because cherries, as any botanist will tell you, are a delivery system.

First come the blossoms, which float down like pink confetti from a very tasteful celebration. Then the fruit appears, bright and glossy and entirely irresistible to birds.

Birds, it must be said, are the least careful agricultural planners on Earth.

They eat the cherries with enthusiasm and distribute the stones across the countryside with a method that might best be described as optimistic. Each cherry stone contains a future tree, and the birds scatter these futures in hedgerows, gardens, parks, gutters, and occasionally the sort of places where town planners would prefer that trees not develop strong opinions.

And so my mother, and both sides of her personality has begun to travel.

Some of the stones land in pleasant locations where new cherry trees grow beside rivers and footpaths. In spring they blossom, and children walk beneath them with wide eyes while petals drift down like slow pink snow. People take photographs. Dogs become accidentally decorative. Someone always says, “Well that’s lovely,” in the tone normally reserved for sunsets and unexpected kindness.

Other stones land in places where they become… assertive.

One young cherry tree has placed its roots beneath a wall and introduced the concept of structural reflection. Another has lifted a paving slab with the quiet determination of someone improving the ventilation. Somewhere, quite possibly, a water pipe is currently negotiating with a cherry root that arrived with all the politeness of a guest and the persistence of family.

My mother would have approved.

She was, after all, sweet and creative and generous with tea and cake and food for anyone who walked through the door. But she was also wild. Brilliant. Chaotic. The sort of person who could rearrange a room simply by existing in it.

The cherry trees appear to have inherited these traits.

Some bring beauty.

Some bring disruption.

Most bring both.

And everywhere they grow they attract birds, which means music in the hedges, colour in the spring, fruit in the summer, and the steady reminder that nature does not believe in tidy endings.

Sometimes I stand beneath the original tree and watch the birds fly away carrying cherries in their beaks.

Each one is transporting a tiny piece of the story.

A future blossom.

A future crack in a wall.

A future moment when someone looks up at a shower of pink petals and smiles for no reason they can quite explain.

Which is how I realised something important.

I didn’t just plant a memorial.

I planted a network.

And somewhere across the countryside, perhaps right now, a cherry seed is settling into the soil and preparing to introduce the universe to my mother.

Which should keep things interesting. 🌸🐦🌱