God and Wonder: Theology, Imagination, and the Arts

by Jeffrey W. Barbeau

There’s a subdivision near us called Mill Run. By a stroke of good luck, the planners decided to line the streets with silver maples instead of those trees from the pit of Gehenna known as Bradford pears. (Bradford pears, by the way, are an abomination. I’m not using that word flippantly. They were engineered in the 1960s and because they cross-pollinate with every other kind of pear tree, their prolific offspring is destroying forests faster than kudzu. I think of them as a tree version of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. They’re preferred by developers because they’re cheap, they grow fast, and they produce malodorous but pretty white flowers in the spring, which happens to be when most home sales happen. But after the developers leave, the trees require regular pruning, a gust of wind can split them in half, and they’re producing an inhospitable forest of non-native offspring that’s riddled with thorns. Left unchecked, they’ll soon overtake all the lovely oaks, maples, sycamores, and ashes that are native to our part of the world. Take my word for it: they’re awful. If you have one in your yard, for goodness sake, cut it down and spend $25 on a maple at Lowe’s.