(Out-of-Print Classic) Chicken Soup for the Unsinkable Soul

Don't Water the Trees You Love

When I was a boy, an elderly doctor named Gibbs lived in our neighborhood. He didn't look much like other doctors. Every time I saw him he was wearing denim work clothes and a straw hat, and the brim in front was made of green plastic that served as sunglasses. Doctor Gibbs laughed easily. His hat and his smile had something in common: both were old, both were creased, and both got a lot of use. Doctor Gibbs never once scolded us children for playing in his yard. He was a doctor and an old man, but what stays in my memory is how kind and good he was.

When Doctor Gibbs wasn't treating sick people at his clinic, he was always planting trees. His property ran to ten acres, and his life's goal was to turn all that land into forest. This good-hearted doctor had a very interesting theory about raising trees — a rule of gardening that went, "No pain, no gain." He never watered a newly planted tree, which was exactly the opposite of traditional gardening.

One day I asked him why, and Doctor Gibbs said that watering plants spoils them. Water a tree, he said, and it grows weaker with every generation. Better to put it in hard circumstances from the start, so the weak trees get thinned out early. Water a tree and it sends its roots down shallow. A tree that can't draw water easily has no choice but to drive its roots deep in search of it.