The Apple Tree's Democracy

What if we planted fruit trees and berry bushes on our front lawns? How would that make a difference?   An old friend has a story to share.

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I am an apple tree, and I want to tell you about love—the kind that democracy cannot survive without.

Love is what I felt the first time Sarah's hand trembled as she reached for my apples, her pride warring with her hunger. A medical bankruptcy had stripped away everything except this house, and now even keeping it meant choosing between medication and meals. Love is what moved through me when I dropped fruit at her feet rather than making her reach, preserving dignity while offering sustenance.

Here in this section of Maple Street, love has taken root everywhere. The pear tree beside me holds late-season fruit when my branches are bare. The fig trees down the block offer their purple sweetness through autumn. The cherry trees bloom first each spring, promising abundance to come. We have become an orchard disguised as a neighborhood, connected not just by the mycorrhizal threads that web beneath our roots, but by something deeper—the recognition that caring for each other is not charity, but survival.

Through the fungal network that binds us, I feel every tree's story. The plum tree three houses down pulses with the joy of morning harvests shared over coffee between neighbors who once were strangers. The walnut tree at the corner carries the satisfaction of shells cracked on front steps while problems are discussed and solutions found together. This is love in action: messy, imperfect, profoundly human.

But travel just six blocks north, and the mycelial whispers grow thin, then silent.

There, beneath the chemical sheen of emerald lawns, the soil lies sterile. Ornamental shrubs stand in rigid formation like soldiers, beautiful and utterly barren. The trees there—if they can still be called my kin—exist in isolation, their root systems severed from community by layers of fertilizer and pesticide. They cannot feel each other, cannot share, cannot love.

In those houses with their perfect facades, hunger gnaws just as sharply, but in silence. Margaret, the corporate lawyer who tends her prized roses, hasn't mentioned to anyone that student loans and her mother's care facility costs mean she often eats nothing but instant ramen. David, whose lawn service keeps his grass impossibly green, quietly calculates whether he can afford both his blood pressure medication and his mortgage payment this month.

The tragedy is not their hunger—hunger can be fed. The tragedy is their isolation. No mycorrhizal network carries their distress to neighbors who might help. No fruit trees drop offerings of connection. No shared harvests create the conversations that reveal struggles and build solutions.

Love is the foundation of democracy because democracy requires seeing the person behind the closed door, recognizing that their hunger is your hunger, their struggle is your struggle. In neighborhoods where love flows freely—where pear trees and blackberry bushes create reasons to linger, to talk, to notice—democracy thrives in countless small acts of mutual care.

Here on Maple Street, we trees have taught humans what we've always known: no one flourishes alone. Every apple shared strengthens the network. Every conversation over berry-picking builds trust. Every act of love—whether it's fruit offered freely or burdens shared—makes democracy possible.

The chemical lawns six blocks north may look pristine, but they're democracy's graveyards. Here, where love grows on branches, democracy lives.

By Democracy Is Us Council Member Joe Castagliola