by Suzanne Buchauer

Our Trees got together and wrote us a letter.

Dearest Humans,

Thank you for providing us with a place on your property. I love providing shade for your bodies, branches for children to climb on, a spot for a tree house, beauty for your eyes, oxygen for your noses, and the gentle sound of rustling leaves for your ears. Since being out of the forest, for so long, we wish to tell you that sometimes, we can become cold and hungry; we wanted to write and explain to you what would help us feel better and help us remain healthy for you, for years to come.

Please, let us have the food that was made for us. Let us explain how easy this will be for you to help us year round.

Please place the leaves that fall from our branches around the base of our trunk each fall. If you want to know how we prefer to live, go to the forest and have a look. In the forest, the leaves fall and stay at our cousins feet, to feed, warm and nourish them.

Photo Credit: by Suzanne Buchauer

It is very frustrating when we hear the blowers come and see you with rake in hand, then watch our food and bedding being taken away each year. We love and need our food. What we sincerely wish for and desperately need is for the leaves to be left at the foot of our trunks. It can be a ring, the size that our majestic arms extend—consider it free mulch, with benefits. It provides us with vital nutrition, which we need to stay healthy and strong. As the leaves break down, they will also enrich your soil around our roots, which we will then thrive in, and the leaves will turn into rich black hummus, with time. We call that black gold.

There are disadvantages for you humans as well as us trees, if you take our leaves away.

If you take away our leaf food, it has to be transported, which costs time and costs you money.

If you take away our leaf food and leave the place at the foot of our trunks bare, we do not have a cozy blanket to protect our roots during a harsh winter and may become weak.

If you take away our leaf food and it is taken to a dumping site, the leaves sit on the dump in huge piles, which then produces methane gasses which hurt humans and our planet.

If you take away our leaf food your soil will not be enriched by the leaves, as they naturally decompose.

If you take away our leaf food, we will be very hungry and become unhealthy, so you will have to spend money to buy and use fertilizer and chemical food and treat us for disease.

If you take away our leaf food and replace the area below our trunk with colored mulch, it adds chemicals to our soil and it is not healthy for us.

We notice that you may not find pleasure in the way our food looks and we were thinking that may be why you want to get rid of it. How about this idea, we had, to help you:

If you do not like the look of our leaf food, you can make the mulch leaf ring and put wood chips on top. That would help the food break down easier and even be better for us, trees.

Leaves are our natural food; we love leaves and need our leaves. When you take them away or blow/rake them to another place in the yard, you are taking our leaf food away from our roots.

Please, allow us to keep the leaves which are made for us to eat, so that we can stay healthy for you and all of your senses, and so that you can enjoy us in your yard and on your property.

In hope and with care, that is our Happy New Year tree wish.

Yours Treely,

Your Trees.

Suzanne Buchauer is founder of DYSLEXIA WORKS. She is a licensed Davis Dyslexia Correction Facilitator who lives in Upper Nyack, NY.

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