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Guest Essay

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who reports from Nashville on flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

Hackberries are native to Alabama, where I grew up, but I was a child born of the piney woods, and I don’t recall ever noticing a single hackberry in my youth. The trees also grow in South Carolina, where I went to graduate school, but they didn’t register with me there, either. I was a newly transplanted Tennessean before I learned about “trash trees,” as people here call them.

The common hackberry is widespread from New England across to the Dakotas and down through the Midwest and Upper South. The Southern hackberry, a species also known as the sugarberry, blankets the Southeast down through Florida and west into Texas and northeastern Mexico. The two species overlap — and sometimes self-hybridize — in Tennessee. The Nashville naturalist Joanna Brichetto, author of the new book “This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature,” calls Nashville “the hackberry capital of the world.”

I don’t know if people call them trash trees in other places, but hackberries are widely disdained in the hackberry capital of the world. Their bark is a rough swath of warts. Their pocked, wrinkled, gall-infested leaves always look a little sick. In spring, their flowers drop to the ground and cover the sidewalks, and in fall their berrylike drupes do the same, without any gorgeous fall color to compensate for the mess.

One of the hackberries’ least desirable characteristics is not, strictly speaking, a feature of the trees themselves. Hackberries are targeted by the invasive Asian woolly hackberry aphid, which like all aphids excretes a sticky form of waste called honeydew. In wet summers, rain washes the honeydew away, but in dry years,........

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