For hundreds of years, a certain breed of patient gardeners has mastered the skill of bonsai, carefully restricting and nurturing trees that would otherwise get to be 50 or 100 feet tall, so that they would fit on a desktop as an object of wonder. The viewer is filled with awe and astonishment at how someone could achieve such a feat. It is not without great skill and effort, as such a restricted environment is fraught with great peril for a tree.
Many of us have seen images of trees that have roots depicted as being just as large underground as the canopy of branches reaching overhead. I have since learned that the root system can be much more extensive than the volume of branches that are visible above ground, more than twice the width of their canopy. So what happens when we constrain a tree in a space that is significantly smaller than the tree would normally need to reach maturity? It’s what you might expect: The tree dies.
Because of rules written into our county’s zoning codes, property developers must provide a certain amount of parking spaces for every building they erect, and a certain number of trees. As one would expect, the developers have an eye to minimize expenses and maximize profits, all while operating within the boundaries of the law. As a result, many trees in Baltimore County must live out their short lives in areas that may be as little as 6×10 ft, or 180 cubic feet of soil, which limits its potential canopy spread to about 10 feet before the tree�.
