The Tree of New York’s Heaven and Hell
Like many people during the pandemic, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time looking out of windows. My window in Washington Heights looked out on a brick wall and a tree strung with shoes. I hadn’t spent many daylight hours in my apartment when my job went remote; suddenly I grew intimate with the afternoon sun’s subtle gradations. I would crane my head out the window for a glimpse and sniff of life. One day I turned my hungry eyes to the tree outside. I realized how little I knew about it from looking. I wanted to know the name of the tree whose blooming was a scarce sliver of joy.
I sent my mom a photo, certain she’d have a good guess: my mom’s an inspired urban gardener, regenerating her soil with cover crops and compost while her neighbors are still spraying their lawns. (The problem there being both “spraying” and “lawns.”) Sure enough, she informed me that it was a “tree-of-heaven” — known by despairing gardeners as the “tree-of-hell.” Ailanthus altissima is native to China, and is one of the most pernicious invasive plants in North America. It is fast-growing and immensely difficult to uproot. It is also allelopathic (from the Greek allelo- and -pathy, combining provocatively to “mutual suffering”), which means that the chemicals it secretes into the soil prevent other plants from growing. I was astonished to discover such an antisocial tree — particularly now, in the wake of The Overstory and The Hidden Life of Trees; in this era of compounding revelations about the communicativeness of trees. I was still reeling from the revelation that underneath the ground, vast mycorrhizal networks connect every plant in a forest, in what’s been called the “wood wide web.” The tree-of-heaven struck me as unnecessarily lonely.
To add insult to injury, the male trees-of-heaven have foul-smelling blossoms, a stink likened to burnt peanuts, cat urine, gym socks, and semen. Apparently I was lucky that the tree outside my window was female. My mom reminded me that the same tree grew outside of Francie’s apartment in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, her favorite book as a child. This was the tree that Betty Smith made a symbol of urban resilience: “it grows in boarded up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly… survives without sun, water, and seemingly earth.”
Learning all of this, at first I felt a grim validation: in pandemic purgatory, of course even the tree outside my window would be so complicated. But there was something sympathetic about its contradictions. This tree was the posterchild of the “New York Tough” mentality. It was fitting, then, but it was also sad. The tree-of-heaven-or-hell is both a symptom and symbol of imbalance, of urban planning and grey infrastructure ignorant of its own ecological consequences. Though I remained grateful for the shock of green outside my window, I couldn’t remain innocent to its context.
The debate about the tree-of-heaven in New York has persisted for over 200 years, almost always as a pretense for conversations about people. The tree-of-heaven was initially exoticized, brought to the US from China in 1784 on a wave of acquisitive orientalism. But by the 1850s, amidst growing “nativist” sentiment (a laughably hypocritical term for the xenophobia of white Americans), the tree-of-heaven became a scapegoat for the Know-Nothing party’s agenda against Chinese immigrants. In June 1855, the New York Times denounced the tree as a “filthy and worthless foreigner,” declaring that “we are Know-Nothings, decidedly, in our opposition to the ailanthus.” In July 1855, a concerned reader countered that indeed “only ‘know-nothings’ will seek to deprive it of its rights.” Six years before the Civil War, even gardening was bloated with the racial politics of the time. (And however much the discourse changes, this continues to be true.)
In the following decades, those with the means and incentive uprooted their Ailanthus altissima with great effort, but the species persisted. By the 1940s, the tree-of-heaven most often ornamented environmentally disturbed and despoiled urban areas. So it was dubbed the “ghetto palm.” In 2015, a New York Botanical Garden blog post portrayed the tree as “an immigrant thriving in New York.” (A dodgy allegory, insofar as the tree-of-heaven edges out native flora; there is a point when merging these narratives does more harm than good.) My understanding of trees was still indebted to the outsized legacy of The Giving Tree, so I was startled to learn that a tree could be deleterious to its ecosystem.
I began reading about invasive species, fascinated by the voracious weeds and pests so haplessly out of place. They made gardeners seem like guardian angels, brandishing trowels and shears against the imbalance of the world. Of course, that isn’t our role, nor would I want it to be. But the farcical end of this train of thought was a foil I hadn’t known I needed. For the analogy between the tree-of-heaven and people goes both ways. To me, this stubbornly lonely tree was a back-door to refiguring people as part of an ecosystem. Perhaps we should consider ourselves allelopathic too, poisoning the soil around us. Though we often refuse the mutual benefits of a life lived with our natural environment, that doesn’t mean we don’t remain a part of it.
It is unsurprising that the tree-of-heaven became both a cipher for xenophobic rhetoric and a symbol of immigrant striving. It is American like that. It is complicated, beautiful, dangerous, individualistic. It shares our grey world, our paved paradise, and it doesn’t demand much for itself. That, I think, is my primary frustration. Though my frustration is less with the tree than with its metonym — us. I worry that the toughness of New Yorkers, our willingness to toil, precludes us from arguing that we deserve better. And I worry that the exhaustion of individual striving leaves us little time to invest in community.
What gives me hope are the mutual aid networks proliferating as our economic system re-inscribes its brokenness. That is the brilliance of mutualism: it’s what makes ecosystems work. In the local, decentralized, grassroots ways in which people are learning to match each other’s needs, I see people building new networks. And I hope that these networks can expand to help us integrate, in feeling and practice, with the ecosystem to which we belong. New York isn’t dead, but it’s shaken, and I’d like to see green collective dreams alive in its rebuilding. I’d like to see us do better than the tree-of-heaven, with its solitary striving.
