Genius Loci
Spirit of Place
The coming of Spring has had me turning my attention to a large cluster of trees I have in my yard. I actually hadn’t thought much about them previously, but more recently I’ve had a number of thoughts (imaginations) converge around these trees.
Although I found out at some point that they are called “Tree of Heaven”, I have always thought they were named “Queen of Heaven” and have decided I am going to continue to think of them as the latter because I like that better and I think it is more suitable :) They are huge, majestic, pale trees that whose tops grow beyond the confines of what I can see out of most of my windows. They have lacy branches and provide massive areas of shade over the patio in the summer. One low hanging branch provides a route for animals between the tree and our roof; we call it the “squirrel highway”.
I live in a house built by my grandpa, who purchased the 3/4 quarter of an acre it sits on in 1940. It was open land, and hadn’t been “owned” by anyone previously, despite European-descended people first moving to Arvada many years before, around the Gold Rush era in the 1850’s. Native American tribes, namely the Arapahoe and Cheyenne, were systematically slaughtered and “relocated” only a few decades after white people began to compete for resources in this area.
My grandfather built the house out of half an army barracks he drug from Lowry Air Force Base when the military was selling off no-longer-needed assets after WWII (the other half of the bunker was my Great-Uncle’s, who built the house next door with it). Fourteen miles away, the building of Rocky Flats, which manufactured chemical weapons including mustard gas, napalm, white phosphorus, chlorine gas and sarin, was completed in 1942.
The Queen of Heavens were planted in my yard because my family of yore needed quick shade. Because my grandparents did not make much money from the auto body and fender business my grandpa ran out of the back shed, the trees needed to be cheap. Queen of Heavens grow very fast and tall — and are dangerously invasive to the ecosystem. Arborists disdain them; they consider them “trash trees”. The trees will push out other species in the yard, and take over flower beds if shoots are not constantly cut. Because of their expansionist nature, they will block other trees from getting the sunlight they need to grow. The branches are brittle, so they fall on, and dent, our cars (and sometimes heads! :) often.
I imagine that there is a female archetype (or energy, or nature spirit), who begins her work this time of year. She is not much different than the Irish Brigid, whose cloak awakens the earth as she walks over Celtic lands. The Maiden in my yard starts warming the air and greening the grass, and helps the small yellow flowers push out of the Rabbit Brush stalks in Spring. It’s also her job to start tending to the small leaf buds on the oak and maple trees.
However, I imagine a different kind of nature spirit looking after the Queen of Heavens. While elegant, tall and lacy, this “Queen” spirit casts a dark shadow. Like the trees she oversees, she is not indigenous to the shortgrass prairie land that is the ecosystem of most of Arvada. She comes from foreign lands. She is proud of her trees, that they have adapted, flourished even, in an unfamiliar landscape despite their fragility and pale bark. The Queen does her best to tend to these trees, and she loves them, but she also carries a sense of shame and grief for what has been lost and damaged, and continues to be lost and damaged, in order for her beautiful trees to grow.
