Mother and Daughter
Countless stories have been written about two characters struggling to save the family farm foreclosure without having to sacrifice crops they have worked so hard to raise. Most of those stories feature a husband and wife as the characters undergoing this drama. This poem tweaks the template by making it about a mother and a daughter living in a home with a single “crop” in the backyard, the walnut tree. This change significantly alters the symbolism. A couple united throughout marriage facing the same circumstances would be symbols of saving the future. Because the mother and daughter are united by bloodlines and represent a family of immigrants that came to Ohio and built up success through farming over generations, they become symbols of saving the past as well as potentially being the end of the line of family continuity.
Roots in the Cellar
One of the biggest cons against keeping the tree during the opening debate is that maintaining the tree means problems with drainage in the cellar due to incursion of the tree’s widening system of roots. The direct impact of the tree upon the family’s house symbolizes the extent to which the tree has impacted the family over the generations.
The Trowel
The speaker compares “something” in their blood which has a sharp edge and can be efficiently wielded like a trowel. A trowel is the tool with a handle attached to a small shovel-shaped piece of metal that increasingly narrows to a sharp point and is commonly used for gardening. The trowel as a garden implement is the symbolic centerpiece of the shrinking of what was once the dominant economic foundation of farming into a mere hobby. The trowel symbolizes every large-scale farming equipment used to raise crops and represents the strong connection the mother and daughter have to their farmer ancestors.
Vines and Orchards and Bounding Fruit
The reference to vines and orchards is associated with the past generations of the family who came to America and literally harvested a new life from the soil of their adopted country. Shrinkage of the impact of rural America’s agricultural dominance of the economy is referenced once again as the future of the family symbolically implied by the tree’s being able to produce “leaves and bounding fruit” for at least another year.
The Black Walnut Tree
The title object is obviously the most significant symbol of the poem. The walnut simply represents the family tree and its multiple generations that have struggled to attain the American Dream.
