Ways of Seeing

“What do you see when you look at a tree on your property? What do you think about?” This is Bill Miller speaking from his Water Mill office. A slight man with deepset eyes and a squirrely pony tail, Miller is an arborist, one of our very best. His talent is overshadowed only by his humility: he has no web page and does not advertise, and in conversation he is not given to self-promotion.  When Miller looks at a tree, he says, he sees the entire cycle of life and death. He can predict which ones will impose the equivalent of martial rule on your garden and which ones will be plagued by leaf miters or bronze birch borers. He knows which local streets are colonized by gypsy caterpillar moths every summer.

“If it were my property,” he goes on, “I’d ask how long can I expect that tree to be part of the landscape. Is it compatible with the other plants in the garden? And what is its life expectancy? If you expect a European beech, for example, to give shelter to your grandchildren, you may be in for a rude surprise.” After a moment he adds: “You might also ask yourself how you want to feel in your garden. Protected? Safe? Enclosed? Me, I want to feel all those things.”

Were you to consult with Miller, you could ask him about this tree or that tree, and he would answer at length, but what interests him most, he says, is space and light. “When I look at a tree, I see it in the future rather than at-this-moment. It’s always in motion, and being such a slow person myself, the rate at which a tree grows is actually very fast for me. Having watched trees so closely and intimately for so long, I’ve a pretty good idea what to expect from them.”

Like anyone who works with plants, he knows that the quality of the soil matters as much as what grows in it. “What’s in the soil is precious and irreplaceable,” he stresses. “Most people don’t even look at the dirt, but that’s where all the magic takes place. A tree in poor soil might creep along for decades. But were that same tree to be planted in great rich earth, it could be stellar.”

Miller is chagrined by the demand for ‘ready-made’ gardens and landscapes, the throw-money-at-the-problem attitude with which many homeowners approach the cultivation of trees.
“Look,” he says, “You can buy a property with oaks and call yourself the so-called owner, but really, you can’t buy an oak. It’s hard to get an oak established–it could take fifteen to twenty years–and they’re almost impossible to transplant. When you take a tree of any size and move it, the most essential part–the root– is left behind and so much of that tree’s potential is lost. You think you’ve bought a tree when really, all you’ve bought is a fragment.”

So what, exactly, does he see when he looks at a tree? He smiles — “Possibilities.”