Goddess of Places Forgotten
Alexandra Duprey
Burgeoning out of the understory with heavy, velvety leaves, I notice that the tall plant feels defiant in the rocky soil of the hillside. I am at a Zen Buddhist retreat in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. As we line up outside the old wood-paneled cabin, built decades ago by Quakers, I breathe in the muggy summer air. We do our walking meditation in unison, our palms held in gassho in front of our faces as we breathe together, elbows akimbo.
The leader at the front of the line walks us up and down the drive. The only sounds are soles against gravel, choral cicadas, and the crickets that rise as dusk descends. With each breath, my mind clears, allowing the subtle noises to melt into me as I give my attention to my senses. I can’t help but notice, again, the plant to the side. She stands alone in the balmy Appalachian heat. Her leaves and stalk are both a deep green, a green richer than those leaves of the Tulip Poplar that whirl in a daze to the forest floor, or the swaying long leaves of the nearby Black Walnut tree, branches heavy with loads of fruit.
The wide leaves of this plant stood apart from one another, the layers spaced so dramatically as not to touch at all, each leaf as independent as the plant itself in this wooded landscape. We pass the plant again and again during our walking meditations, each of us half an arm’s length away from one another, yet together like leaves along her stem.
Those evenings, the sun dipped down, down, down along the rolling spine of the hillside. Even the sun bows to the Appalachian Mountains, their ancient power stowed in leaf litter and tannin-stained streams. The plant reached up towards the stars and meteors rocketing through the heavens, while the Buddhists dreamed of emptiness.
I learned her name a month later during a tour through a forest in southern Maryland, about an hour and a half from West Virginia. The plant was growing in a completely different ecosystem, a muddy riparian valley. The guide told me the plant’s scientific name is Paulownia tomentosa, commonly referred to as Empress Tree, Princess Tree, or Foxglove-Tree. All of the other plants we discussed together had anthropocentric significance as food sources or for simple aesthetic pleasure. When I asked about this plant, however, the guide was unsure. He responded, “Well, it’s invasive.”
Like Zen Buddhism, the Empress Tree spread from Asia to the United States across the vast cold waters of the Pacific Ocean. In my ignorance, I confused the Empress Tree’s early stages with her final state. In fact, the Empress Tree transforms over her lifespan from a plant-like leafy adolescent into a magnificent tree with a dense canopy and a thick trunk. As one of the fastest-growing trees in the world, the Empress Tree can grow 15 feet every year before reaching the mature height of 50 feet and a width of 30 feet. Her wiles at staking a position in the sun makes her a champion in evolutionary agility, yet a villain in the stories of many land managers. When fully mature, her canopy is so dense that very little can grow in her shade, stifling any potential understory. But perhaps the competition is scarce to begin with, for the Empress Tree can handle all sorts of soils unattractive to other species, from the rocky West Virginia hills to a muddy valley floor, and spreads her roots out with steadfast resilience. When her leaves do fall, they create cover needed for healthy decomposition and soil turnover. She has the potential to absorb ten times more carbon dioxide than other tree species, making her a nature-born response to the greenhouse gases that humans are pumping into the atmosphere.
The Dutch East India Company brought the Empress Tree to the United States in 1840, less than 400 years after European colonization began along the eastern coast of this sprawling land. Over the course of the 185 years that the Empress Tree has thrived in the eastern United States, her properties were favorable at times for humans, such as her medicinal uses and her lightweight timber. Only in recent years has the tree become an unwanted outlaw, a “dangerous exotic invasive” as the University of Maryland Extension describes. In response to such slander, I imagine the Empress Tree collecting her skirt in shock and bolting up, pulling her roots out of the soil. “I’m obviously not wanted here!” she cries before turning away, sobbing beneath her weighty canopy.
I have no personal baseline to understand what this region looked like 500 years ago, before Europeans came with their guns, diseases, and stowaway plants. Regardless, I admire how the Empress Tree took root in strange, difficult soil thousands of miles from home. I moved to Baltimore, Maryland two years ago. The Empress Tree has been in this area almost 100 times longer than me. Yet here I am, cruising around with a Maryland driver’s license, essentially accepted into this place I rather arbitrarily decided to live in, while she is denounced as dangerous. After my first encounter with Paulownia Tomentosa in the rolling hills of West Virginia, I see her across my city, in seemingly every forgotten nook and cranny. In her own intelligence and logic, she recognizes something in rooting in the most difficult places.
While the United States is a relatively young country, we have ruins. Our ruins are the decomposing settlements left when private interests have come and gone, from the forlorn mills of New England to the silent main streets of Southern agricultural towns. The dejection of industrial collapse and subsequent depopulation is especially pronounced in Baltimore. This, in combination with the historic, racialized neglect of the city by the state and federal government, has led to pockets of the city resembling embattled war zones. As one moves through Baltimore, they may see America’s version of lost ruins: gaping brick row houses overgrown with vines, hollowed-out shopping centers spotted with rotted mattresses, and emptied downtown skyscrapers boarded up with windows as black as night. The edges and corners are host to humans sleeping on flattened cardboard with bags of belongings. The asphalt is hot, potholed, and covered in refuse. Baltimore has abandoned places. This is where the Empress Tree thrives.
And thrive, she does. One evening before dusk, when the sun was low and heavy, I was biking on Baltimore’s Jones Falls Trail, parallel to the namesake stream. I passed makeshift shelters in the brush made from boxes and tarp, a vacant graffiti-strewn factory, an overpass. Suddenly, I hit a sickening scent like a wall; the piss and trash you smell on the hidden margins of a gritty place, mingled with a sappy sweetness. Around the turn, revealed in the glorious golden light, was a beautiful Paulownia tomentosa. She was bursting from herself, fireworks of yellow and green in fragmented beams glowing around and through her leaves. Lush, fragrant flowers draped from her branches over me. In her riot, she calls me to question my own avoidance. Look at these ruins, this wreckage, she prompts. It is good soil to seed in. What use is hopelessness when you can joyfully climb towards heaven, sprouting sensuous vanilla-scented flowers as you go?
The Empress Tree stands tall over that stream and its discarded inhabitants. Spread out along the water are other species known as invasive, including English Ivies, Morning Glories, and Trees of Heaven, coating the dead cement and rust in effervescent chlorophyll. Paulownia tomentosa, an outlaw and world traveler, made beautiful the wretched discards of this place and its exiles, folding us all in her sweet embrace. Our Goddess of Places Forgotten glances down at the robins splashing in the cool water and silently grows, grows, grows.