Life Lessons from the Buckthorn
When I’m not writing or coaching or speaking, you’ll mostly find me out in our woods rehabilitating what had become something of a Canadian jungle.
Before we bought our little corner of paradise, buckthorn, prickly ash, wild honeysuckle, and grapevines had been allowed to run riot for decades. Native trees – maples, oaks, cherries, ash, and hickory, had been compromised, twisted, and mis-shapen. The understory, left bleak and dark, had no wildflowers and no ferns. Nasty. If you like, something of a “Secret Garden’.
Over the years I’ve rid the place of nearly all the wild grapes, and most of the other gangsters. But in the process I’ve learned a great deal of respect for these persistent vagrants. They don’t want to quit and they’ll fight back, especially the prickly ash and the buckthorn. Friends often ask me if I’ve had an encounter with a wildcat.
Wild grapes will send out tendrils reaching to cling to anything in range, science fiction style, and over a single season grow three or four meters up an otherwise healthy tree, choking off light, pulling it down, slowly warping the shape, in the manner of a boa constrictor, ultimately killing it.
Wild honeysuckle, here and there as a single plant, can be delightful, showy, and fragrant. But this invasive species can’t leave well enough alone and will expand its rule by seed and by root propagation until a former meadow is a dense and impenetrable tangle where nothing else will grow. And prickly ash will shred your legs, arms, hands, gloves, and clothing without a hint of remorse. One quickly learns respect.
But my “favourite” enemy is the buckthorn. If Darwin had known my woods, he’d have loved the buckthorn– they have exploited every adaptation you can imagine.
Buckthorns are the first to green in the spring and the last to shed their leaves in winter, the first to bloom, the longest to hold their berries. In the winter, the fruit remains and becomes the food of choice, if not the only food, for many birds. As if this adaptation is not enough advantage, the fruit has a highly laxative quality, ensuring that the birds spread the seeds far and wide, thoughtfully packaged in a bit of avian fertilizer.
Buckthorns also spread by root propagation, developing a “colony” that spreads and spreads until they become the dominant species, and if left long enough, the only species. As each plant reaches upwards toward the light, it will grow into every available open space in the tree line, twisting and tangling almost like a vine, until the crowns of these and all the other trees are a tight, unified and tangled mass, reminiscent of the Amazonian jungle. When you cut or pull down one tree, you are picking a fight with the whole colony. There’s no simple way to kill these things, but I’ll admit to judicious doses of poison and torching.
While wild grapes and the prickly ash are native, the buckthorn and most honeysuckles were introduced in the 1800s as ornamentals, and escaped to wreak havoc. As newcomers, they have few natural enemies. Native species have not had time to develop defenses and countermeasures. Essentially the world is their oyster to do with as they wish. Just not on my little piece of paradise.
As I work the woods I think back to my law practice, to clients I never should have taken, to partners and associates who would have been better left to someone else, to staffers who were, at best, “unsuited” to working at our firm. Not to say any of these were bad people, but it would have been simpler and richer for them and for us had they not been part of our professional life.
To be sure, most of the time I was blessed with amazing staffers, “above and beyond” kind of people, bright, hard working, funny, professional, and dedicated. Ditto with partners and associates. But I also had my share of buckthorns, individuals who were there for themselves without regard to anyone around them. Shame on me for tolerating them.
You only get to go around once, and your career is of limited duration. The more time you waste with buckthorn people who will take advantage of you and your firm, well, the more time you waste. You’ll never get it back.
Little by little my woods are becoming thick with maples and pines, spruces and cherries, aspens and fir, even an occasional butternut, and trilliums, violets and adders-tongues are flourishing in the understory.
If I have a regret about my law career, it’s that I had not applied the same principles as I now apply to my woods.
And you? Need to talk?