Oh, we loved those baby trees. Scraggly little things: bare-root tulip trees. One hundred and fifty of them. Let me repeat: One hundred and fifty of them. Only eighteen inches tall, they would eventually soar to eighty feet, with trunks too thick to close your arms around. And there were (did I mention this?) one hundred and fifty of them.

All of which we had to plant. Right away, while they were dormant (it was early spring). No small task. We wanted to ring with trees the wooded parcel we own with my in-laws, which meant tromping into the woods and making 150 holes in dense underbrush.

My in-laws have a tractor with various components, one of which is a frighteningly large drill. And so for a whole day (or was it two?), my father-in-law drove the tractor and drilled each hole, while his wife, Ginny, and I would pull the dirt out, carefully put in a baby tulip tree, then fill the hole back up and stomp the dirt down. Doing this 150 times was a staggering amount of work. To keep my sanity, I composed a song as we went, and began to sing it. Here are the words, to be sung to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance:

Oh, the Russians they stomp on the tables

And Annie, she stomps on Green Gables

And Aesop, he stomped on some fables,

But the Lobdells, they stomp in a hole.

Oh, they stomp on hot coals in Calcutta;

In a mosh pit, they stomp on each otha’

But to plant just one tree or anotha’

You will sure have to stomp in a hole.

You must stomp in a hole for a poplar

You must stomp in a hole for an oak

If you think a shovel

Can handle the trouble

Then I’d like to know what you smoke.

So jump in! Use your feet!

I wish I could say it’s a treat!

Oh... (back to top, ad nauseam...)

In the end, they were planted.

Now, they had to be watered, frequently, 150 of them – spread through dense underbrush. My in-laws being the amazing Yankee can-do types that they are, we quickly developed a system: Using a hose, Ginny and I filled the tractor’s bucket with water, then carefully tractored around the woods, trudged through the undergrowth, and eventually watered all the trees. It took three tractor-buckets of water and nearly two hours, twice a week. It was a lot of work, but so obviously worth it, because we were going to have the most magnificent collection of tulip trees ever.

When caterpillar season approached, we were determined to protect our trees with insecticide. Ginny found a plastic bottle in the garage, left over from the previous year. It was a funny shape with a distinctive dispensary spray. I again went trudging through the underbrush, misting each little tree, and giving each a pep talk about how it would thrive, safely protected from the caterpillars (if you don’t believe I really did this, you’re forgetting I wrote that song). There was some left over, so I doused every tree in our separate nursery of saplings from Polly Hill Arboretum in West Tisbury.

One sapling died within two hours.

Next day, all the Polly Hill trees looked woozy. Two days later, most were ailing. It was harder to assess the tulip trees – just big twigs, really – but they didn’t look too chipper. We kept watering them, determined to ring the property with magnificent leafy boughs.

One night, as we were mourning the nursery (which had gone from glorious to dead in less than three weeks), Ginny suddenly looked as if she’d eaten bad clams. “I just remembered what last year’s pesticide container looked like,” she said. “It didn’t look like the container I gave you.”

“So what was in the container you gave me?” I asked, suddenly feeling like I had eaten the same bad clams.

“I have no idea,” she said, stricken.

Immediately, a commercial came on TV for Round-Up, a super-duper extra-strength weed killer. The bottle had the same unusual shape as the unlabeled bottle she had given me. I had doused every plant we loved with the strongest herbicide in America.

I’d never felt so sickened and guilty in my life. We consulted three arborists, and decided to flush out the poison by watering every other day. Two hours, every other day. For weeks. As the tops looked deader and deader, we clipped them shorter and shorter, until we were watering two-inch stubs (which, one arborist warned, could not absorb the water without leaves).

This story does not end well. At a certain point – early July? – we accepted the painful fact that every single tulip tree had given up the ghost. We stopped watering.

But if some day, kind reader, you stumble across a young tulip tree in the middle of dense huckleberry growth, think well of us. We erred mightily, but goodness, how we tried.