There are things I fond growing that continue to surprise me.
Many years ago, my father got his hands on a few white cedar samplings. Although they grow in much of the north east, they are not known much in Nova Scotia. For some reason, they don’t seem to like it around here. They grow naturally in New Brunswick, but not so much further east.
But we somehow managed to come up with a bunch of these small cedar trees from New Brunswick. The weather isn’t much different, so why wouldn’t they grow here?
So they were planted. They area where they were planted is mostly sandy soil. I mean real sand. Hardly anything of any nutritional value is contained in this soil. It is also very acidic, due to the fact that most of what does live there are oaks and pines. So not the ideal area to plant anything. But the cedars were planted.
I don’t remember exactly when this was, but I was much younger at the time. It’s been at least forty plus years. Normally, a cedar tree of this type would probably be about fifty feet tall. But not these. They just never grew much at all.
At the time, I believe my father had dreams of growing his own crop of telephone poles. Tall, straight cedars as far as the eye could see. Except most of them only grew to the height of about three feet. If that far. They just really do not like it around here. There are two that got bigger. Out of about two dozen that were planted, only two sprouted higher. And even those two are not much beyond twenty feet.
We have no idea why two of these decided to grow while the rest did not. Except that the two that grew are right in front of the deck and have become masters at blocking our view. But since these are the only two that grew, we are not about to cut them down. They’ve been through enough.
But after several decades of watching these little trees struggle, yet refuse to give in, I noticed something else. Around the corner, in a spot usually downwind from their older relatives, I have discovered two new baby cedars. They won’t grow, but they’re not about to give up. And they are somehow producing offspring. And the offspring don’t appear to want to give up.
They seem healthy, but I’m still not holding my breath for my own crop of telephone polls.
