Tremont’s Trained Trees

As a child, I loved topiary being pruned into magical creatures in books like Chris Van Allsburg’s The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. When I lived in Washington, DC, I went to National Bonsai & Penjing Museum so I could contemplate the carefully trained small trees that resembled scenes so much bigger than themselves. And now, in middle age, I’ve come to appreciate the otherworldly powerline pruning of Historic Tremont in Cleveland, Ohio. “Training” trees to avoid overhead electrical lines isn’t uncommon across America, but the wide swaths of space given to them in Tremont is quite something to behold. It is almost as if the lines are saying, “Give us space, and give us space to grow because more condos, more people, and more power are coming.” (And they have.) But nature, not unlike Trapped Tree in neighboring Ohio City, shrugs and carries on, upwards towards the sky, as if quietly saying, “I promise you that there is room for all of us.”