Secrets of Harmony Grove by Mindy Starns Clark Page B

quiver.
Just as my head with its uncropped hair is always young,
so you also will wear the beauty of undying leaves.”
     
    “Okay, that’s pretty sad,” Rip said. “Since you cannot be my bride, you must be my tree? I mean, personally, I’d like to find my soul mate, but I’d rather have no one at all than fall in love with a tree.”
    We all laughed.
    “Is that where it ends?” Charlie asked.
    “Almost. There’s one more,” I said. “I’d read it to you, but it’s on the marker over where they’re working.”
    I hadn’t thought that either Mike or the tech were even listening to us, but they must have been because the tech paused in what he was doing to read it for us.
    “It says, ‘The laurel bowed her newly made branches and seemed to shake her leafy crown, like a head giving consent.’”
    “At least it ends on an upbeat note,” Mike commented. “Sort of.”
    “Yeah,” Charlie replied, “’cept that’s a bay laurel and this is zone seven. Not gonna be a happy ending for
this
tree.”
    I wasn’t sure what he meant, but Rip understood and soon the two men were discussing trees and gardening and climate zones. Apparently, Charlie was of the opinion that bay laurels could never survive a Pennsylvania winter and in this region should always be planted in giant pots, ones that could be moved inside when temperatures began to plummet. Rip disagreed, insisting that if you nursed one along carefully enough and protected it until its roots had been well established in the ground, that it could be done. His was the winning point, because I was pretty sure that this was the very same bay laurel tree that had always been here.
    Both men finally quieted down, focusing again on their guardsman duties. I waited quietly nearby, shining my flashlight out into the grove, looking for more holes in the ground. I felt hopeful that we would find something, but despite my searching and the efforts of both Mike and the technician, they couldn’t find any special evidence in this area either, nothing except that which we had originally observed, the tended and raked ground.
    We continued on toward the German Gate. As we walked I began picking the brains of the two gardeners, wondering if perhaps the Fishing Tree had received its name not from the quote on its nearby metal marker, butinstead for some horticultural reason. The two men tossed around ideas for a while, but they couldn’t come up with anything.
    “No ‘catfish rose’ or ‘trout vine’ or anything like that?” I pressed.
    Charlie replied that fish heads and fish powder were sometimes used as fertilizer, but otherwise he couldn’t think of any plant or tree that had “fish” in its name. Rip said something about it was ringing a bell, and he offered to look at his gardening books at home and let us know.
    “I think you’re both barking up the wrong tree,” Charlie quipped, making us smile.
    Our smiles faded as we neared our destination: the German Gate.
    As children we had always avoided this area, not liking the violent and dark poetry on the markers here or even the trees themselves. Unlike the rest of the grove, which featured a wide variety of tree types, the ones on the other side of the German Gate were all the same kind, beech trees I think, and they had been planted in straight, tight rows, like soldiers standing at attention.
    Unlike the rest of the grove, which mimicked its German original, this section had been entirely of my grandfather’s design. If the grove was shaped as a sort of long oval, this section was a bulge on the outside of that oval. The gate was closed, blocking the entrance to the bulge, though of course all one needed to do to get into it was walk around the gate. Its lettering faced inward, into the grove, the words “
Jedem das Seine
” spelled out in a stark, art deco style amid the wrought iron, crisscross pattern of the massive doors.
    Taking it all in, as an adult I could appreciate the symmetry of the