all living things shed

We need to embrace messy trees.

Shedding is a part of life, a literal byproduct of it, one way living things are connected to each other. Things fall off of us, they feed or make homes for someone else. Humans shed 30 - 40,000 skin cells every minute of every day - that’s 9 pounds in a year. Everything that falls off that tree benefits another living thing - feeding and sheltering a whole web of fungi, birds, soil biota, insects and small mammals.

We desperately need more trees and species diversity in residential areas - ‘mess’ is not a good enough reason to disqualify a species from being a part of our urban canopy. We have to stop cutting down healthy trees because of what they shed.

Yes - this detritus might annoy you. It might make a neighbor mad. It might make sense to remove tree-shed from some areas for ease, safety, accessibility, or even because you like the way it looks. It is useful to take tree-shed into consideration when choosing and locating a tree. But if we can think of tree-shed as something to be managed instead of eliminated, we can support so much more life around us.

What are the values we want to carry with us in this ecologically critical time? I know that many of us want to hold space for more and diverse life - so let’s interrogate the ideas of ‘cleanliness’ in the landscape and our sometimes unreasonable expectations for trees that might run counter to those values.

Hurray for messy trees!