Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Volunteer!


I don’t know what other people call them, but sometimes, a shrub or tree shows up in our yard on its own.We call them "volunteers."
One day, I noticed a sapling next to the sidewalk leading to our front door. It had a long, woody stem topped by a bunch of dark green, leaves, gritty and sticky. It was ugly and I said it should go, but my husband, Charlie, said we should wait and see what it turned into. Well, I waited – and what it turned into was bigger, and uglier, and more of a nuisance with every passing season.Whip-like branches snaked every which way and snagged people who walked by. Every month or so I threatened to whack it off at its roots and Charlie procrastinated.
Finally I'd had enough. If it was going to stay in my front yard it would have to be better behaved. So I pruned it. Cut those snaky branches down, cleaned the suckers off the trunk, and when I finished I had an actual tree – small and lean, with a scaly trunk and a round crown.No more grabbing at passersby. But there were still those sticky, gritty leaves.
A friend came over. “Hey, he said, that looks like an anaqua tree.” Oh, the thing had a name. Now we were getting somewhere. I researched anaquas. They had another name – sandpaper tree. I looked up as much as I could find about my new landscape feature. The photos showed a well-shaped tree covered with white flowers which are supposed to appear in the spring followed by berries.
Sure. Right. Years went by. Spring after spring came and went. No flowers. No berries. Just sandpaper leaves on a slow-growing tree. Well, the trunk was slow-growing. Those branches still kept shooting off in every direction and I kept lopping them off so the tree would keep its shape.
 I e-mailed an agricultural expert who writes a column for a Texas Hill Country newspaper to ask him why my anaqua was barren. He didn’t bother to answer.
Winters in San Antonio usually last a week or so and then it’s business as usual – back to sub-tropical. But the winter of 2009-2010 was cold. And for the first time, the anaqua lost its leaves. With the leaves gone, I could see that the branches had formed a dense tangle and there was an abandoned dove’s nest deep in the snarl. That spring, bright new (but still gritty) leaves appeared on the tree. And, wonder of wonders, a few tiny bunches of white flowers, like miniature bridal bouquets. The next spring brought more flowers and a few berries.
Birds discovered our tree. They looked on those springy, tangled branches as a kind of jungle gym.  In the spring of 2011 we left our front door open so we could listen to the bird symphony going on in out there. 
Last February we had a surprise hailstorm. It lasted 45 minutes and stripped the leaves off many of our plants – including the anaqua. We wondered if it would recover. By the end of March the leaves came back. The doves returned to raise a family. In April the leaves almost disappeared under a white dome of blossoms. Then came the berries. Along every branch hundreds of tight bunches of green pellets ripened into pea-sized yellow, orange and red fruits. Now we have an all-you-can-eat buffet outside our living room window. Squirrels practice acrobatics on the branches, stuffing themselves with berries, trying to fend off the sparrows, finches, swallows, cardinals and doves muscling in on the free buffet. Meanwhile, mockingbirds do their best to knock the squirrels out of the tree
Our Anaqua is an overnight sensation.  It gives shade.  It attracts butterflies, bees and birds. It’s drought resistant. And just think. It only took ten years.

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