Sometimes trees pop up, seemingly from nowhere, as gifts from the birds. We protect a volunteer black locust and a volunteer red mulberry as tenderly as any nursery-bought seedling. A volunteer hackberry already reaches to the power line. Soon we will run out of room at the margins and be forced to set seedlings down right in the middle of our yard, wherever there is space between the trees that are already here. The neighbor who does not like our leaves once told me we should cut down most of our trees. “They’re so thick it feels like the house can’t breathe,” she said. “That’s because it
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