It's Ordinarily Magnificent

The Boston Globe

I saved the receipt. I stuck it in a gardening journal, which I began with vigor 10 years ago. I'd taken a course, and Kristen, the teacher, said we should all keep a gardening journal. So I did. For a while.

That first year, I cut and pasted pictures of every flower I planted. Little Leo Leopard's Bane. Osteospermum. Dunkle Schone Aster, which I described as "compact, with daisylike blue flowers." I filled planters. I edged borders. I fertilized.

By the end of the second summer I had pretty much abandoned the journal, and by the third summer, I had pretty much abandoned gardening, too. Oh, occasionally I'd buy a few things — hanging plants, which would die from thirst. Planters that someone else had designed. Impatiens because they were pretty, until I killed them. Out of habit, I continued to tuck the receipts for all these things into my journal instead of just tossing them in the trash. Which is how I know exactly when I bought and how much I paid for the tree that now fills my front yard. It was Sunday, April 26, 2009. And the tree cost $50.

What the receipt does not tell me, however, is the kind of tree I purchased that day. A pear tree is what I asked for. A pear tree was what I wanted. Everywhere I looked that spring, there were small, beautifully shaped trees bursting with white lacy flowers. They lined the roads. They stood out. They were white in a sea of green.

They're pear trees, someone told me. I looked up pear trees and read that Bradford pears are fast-growing and great for front yards, that they grow in a tight, symmetrical shape so they always look pruned. And that every spring — and this was the clincher — they are "an explosion of pure, white flowers."

The day I drove to Polillio's in Stoughton and picked out my tree, there were only a few flowers on its tiny branches. But it was a baby. I was a foot taller. Its blooms would come.

I dug a hole and planted the tree myself. Then my husband hammered stakes into the ground and secured its skinny trunk with twine. That first winter, I watched it from my office window, wondering if it would survive. Every time it snowed, it looked like a young flamingo trying to balance on one spindly leg. I was sure a gust of wind would snap it in two.

But it survived. And come spring, though it was still small, it was pear-shaped — just as it should be. Just as a pear tree looks in all the pictures. Except there were no white blossoms.

And that's the problem. Except for a single year, there have never been white blossoms on my tree. Up and down the street, all over town, all over neighboring towns, every spring, the pear trees are like debutantes dressed for a cotillion, their blossoms like tulle lace, swishing and swaying in the breeze. "Look at them!" people gasp.

And then there is my tree. Enormous, yes. Still kind of pear-shaped, yes. But green. Totally, uniformly green.

It isn't what I expected. Or what I thought I bought. My tree does not make a person gasp. My tree does not dazzle.

But it fit in my back seat when I bought it just seven years ago. I lifted it in and out. It was a broomstick with a few bristles on the top. Now it's almost as tall as the telephone pole it hides and it's wide enough to fill half the front lawn.

And this dazzles me.

I wanted beauty, and I got it. It isn't the pear tree I thought it was. It isn't a tree that stands out. It's ordinary.

But every day when I look at it, when I see its stature, its grace, the shadow it casts, its shimmery leaves, its big, sturdy presence, I am reminded — and I need to be reminded — that even the most ordinary things, when you really look at them, are not ordinary at all.