studio non troppo : mindful design : facilitation

Photo: titanium22

We received a cherry tree via UPS last night. Sue had ordered the tree sometime in the fall for delivery in the spring. It’s a bare root tree and is a self-pollenating dwarf variety. We’re excited to have the tree and are looking forward to seeing it grow and blossom and fruit.

The thing is, we don’t know where we’re going to plant it.

It’s a busy day today, and we’re looking to plant the tree tomorrow (the instructions say we can keep it indoors that long). We don’t really have a “perfect” place to plant it, but there are many places on the property we obviously won’t put it, so at least we’ve narrowed down the possibilities some.

Once we plant it, we won’t want to move it. It’s not as if we could try one spot for a week and then move it to another one; it’s not a houseplant. So picking a spot is a commitment.

We don’t know how big it will actually grow, what shape it will be, or how it will affect the other plants nearby or the ecology of our little plot. We’ll be able to prune it, adjust the watering, and move some of the things around it, but there’s only so much we will be able to adjust or control about the tree’s life.

The most important thing is that we do have to plant it. We can’t wait to find or make a “perfect spot” for it.

So, unlike what I advocated in my post about setting things up to be easily modified, we’ll just be putting it into the ground and seeing what happens. I think nurturing and building, though having creating in common, feel very different.