Small Wonders--Land of the Cottonwoods

Cottonwood, LaFrambois Island

Maybe you've heard. As unlikely as it seems, trees may be our saviors. Researchers somewhere have determined we could plant 2.5 billion acres of new trees without losing an inch of farmland or even cutting back on urban sprawl; and those billions of trees--deep breath here--can sweep up and away 200 gigatons of the carbon we create, carbon that's warming us dangerously. As Margaret Renkl said in a recent Times Opinion piece, "Planting trees. . .could go a long way toward saving us from ourselves."

If that's true, and if we do start, then I hope--I really do--that more than a few are cottonwoods.

Now, I know some people--farmers mainly--think cottonwoods are just xxl weeds. I get that. Cottonwoods grow as fast as hybrid corn, yield a wood so soft it's hardly worth burning, leave yards full of trash in almost every season, and, out here at least, sometimes look martyred to the wind, their branches broken and bent, victims of never-ending Great Plains weather wars.

In winter, they're naked as jay birds, looming giants in the grove. Speaking of winter, cottonwoods haven't a clue about seasons--they snow in summer, leaving fussy cotton-ny trash over everything. They're messy as two-year olds, even the ancients, the ones so barrel-chested they take up the whole yard.

Whether, as a species, they Hoover-up carbon is a question I can't answer, but in many ways cottonwoods were long ago already our saviors out here, where, often as not, they were the only tree--the only visible outline of anything--like a huge upturned buoy in an ocean of grass. Native people turned cottonwood groves into prayer rooms. Wherever two or three poplars are gathered, wagon trains considered them rest stops: there had to be water nearby.

Cottonwoods do best near water. A friend of mine who knows such things, once told me that cottonwood seeds require a good soaking to germinate, need floods in fact, do well in them, can't live without them. On LaFrambois Island, east of Pierre, you can't miss dozens of newly-planted, three-foot cottonwoods, each preciously fenced in. Ever since the Missouri's dam system controls flooding--mostly--those baby cottonwoods need to be planted, not created as they'd been for thousands of years.

Did I mention the bark--amazing stuff, beautiful in its own gruff way, thick and ribbed and rumbly. Woodcarvers peel it away from dying cottonwoods because it carves up sweetly, soft as clay almost, I'm told.  

Big blue stem doesn't reign over Siouxland as it once did. Today, corn and soybeans cover the earth. Nothing that grows up from our blessed Loess soil is as thoroughly native as our cottonwoods, the trees that tower above farm groves, the stand-alone giants ones that look like royalty across otherwise empty fields, the broken figures whose battered branches best tell the stories of the plains. They're heroes.

Buffalo loved rubbing their sides up against that that unmistakable furrowed bark. Sometimes lonely cottonwoods in all that prairie land would be flooded by a moat of buffalo fur three feet deep, what was left behind when an endless herd rubbed up against it.

There's one growing in our flower garden right now--three feet tall maybe, a single buggy whip of a tree, a little quaking aspen cottonwood. Really should go. Really should get pulled. It's not supposed to be there. Really, it's a weed.

But it's a weed with a history, a weed that wants a chance to grow. And we need trees. Researchers claim they're our best shot against global warming. Besides, look at what they've done for us. 

Might as well hold back the wind. Might as well draw the curtains on all that open sky. Might as well let that little cottonwood alone. Let it be, just let it be.