For 15 years, it was our neighbor—though I suppose I rarely thought of it that way when it was living, until just before we said goodbye.

“It” was an enormous, ancient-looking camphor tree on the parking strip beside the house just south of us. The species—which sports a huge canopy, crazed, cracked bark, and shiny leaves—is native to East Asia, but was used as a street tree in California because it grows quickly and casts great shade. This was once invaluable for our eager suburbs: Camphors are common Bay Area street trees, even if, for various reasons, they are no longer often planted. The ones in my town, El Cerrito, date from an earlier era, probably the late 1930s and early ’40s, when little bungalows filled our subdivisions, when developers guttered and paved over our many streams. I don’t know, but I guess that my neighbor-the-camphor was planted about 1938, the same time as identical bungalows were first built on our suburban street.

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Tess Taylor is a poet, playwright and cultural critic who Ilya Kaminsky recently hailed as “the poet for our moment.” She writes about place, ecology and cultural reckoning, and her poems have received wide national and international acclaim. She is the author of five celebrated poetry collections including The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, and Rift Zone (named a 2020 Boston Globe best book), and Work & Days (a 2016 NY Times best poetry book). Her work as a cultural critic appears in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, CNN, The New York Times, and more. She has taught widely, from UC Berkeley to Queen’s University in Belfast, and served as on air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She recently published her first full length poetry anthology, Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. A staged adaptation of her book of poems about Dorothea Lange will launch at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2025. Her next book, Come Bite, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2027. She lives and gardens just outside Berkeley, California.