— This could apply to a number of things I’ve come across recently, but right now I’m talking about all the bad press the ailanthus tree has gotten lately. Sometimes known (in happier times) as The Tree of Heaven, it was imported into the U.S. a couple hundred years ago or so, and has been busily growing around ever since.

Nothing really effective can be done about that, but a lot of people seem to be upset about it. They hate ailanthus trees because 1. They’re not native; they came from China in about 1784, and 2. They grow like, well, weeds.

I say, stop bad-mouthing them! Stop attacking them! Stop uprooting them!

Because, if it weren’t for ailanthus trees, we’d have a lot less green growth around and a lot less shade on hot summer days. I don’t know about you but that’s a boat that floats for me any day of the week.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the ailanthus tree, because I spent the first years of my life in a house within walking distance of way-downtown Wheeling, West Virginia, and nothing much green could be seen for blocks around. Actually, in other ways, it was a pretty colorful neighborhood. There were maybe half-a-dozen bars within one block of our parsonage, which provided pretty garish behavior, especially in our back alley. Two doors above us, there was a beer garden of which I was particularly fond, because it had a jolly lot out front planted with all colors of flowers in the summer, unheard of for that part of town. I suspect there were a couple houses of a red light persuasion around too, though no one ever pointed them out to me and I certainly never noticed them at the time.

But sadly missing was much of anything like a green tree. Except in our back yard, which actually boasted, for a few of my early years, two trees! One was a very stunted apple tree, which never once, poor thing, fulfilled its purpose in life by bearing a single apple in all the years I knew it. However, it did provide some good climbing, until it died when I was about 6.

The other tree, jutting crookedly out from the foundation of the house on the side that grownups never ventured into, between our house and my best friend Phil’s house next door, was, of course, my wonderful ailanthus. I never knew the name of it in those days. I just knew it was a tree and I loved it then, and do still love it, in memory, to this very day. It was about six to eight feet tall, depending on whether I had pulled off any branches recently to assist in games we used to play. (Ailanthus branches look vaguely like palm branches, or as close as you could get to palms in Wheeling.)

This tree wasn’t much good for climbing, which probably saved its life. It did however come in handy for any number of other things, ranging from triumphal processions, to amateur theatrics, to bedding for pet rabbits. And it never seemed to mind being raided — just grew hardier and higher, greener and shadier, as the years went on. Oh, it was a treasure in that barren back yard, and I cherished it!

We moved away when I was 12, and within a few years that wonderful house was demolished so that the gas station on the corner (which had wonderful concrete all over for roller-skating, too often preempted by stupid cars) could be expanded. My ailanthus tree went, without, so far as I know, of course, a whimper. Trees are like that.

But since then I’ve hated to hear the nasty things people say about ailanthus trees. They call them trash plants and actually outlaw them in some places, like the District of Columbia, which has forbidden them to be deliberately planted for more than a century. Actually, after the ailanthus heyday in the 1840s, no one deliberately planted them anymore. Yet they have spread all over the east, in woods, and beside roads, but most important of all in downtown waste areas, usually all by themselves.

And purists, who destroy every ailanthus they see, on the excuse that it’s an invasive alien, seem to have no idea that it fits a space that no other tree can fill — just because it grows! Simply enough, it grows where no other trees will grow! Surely that is a powerful argument in favor of letting the Tree of Heaven fit into the blasted areas of our environment, giving shade, fixing carbon, and producing oxygen.

Okay, so it takes over. But it wouldn’t if the other trees would do their part! Destroying all the ailanthus in sight doesn’t seem to increase the number of other more respectable trees. Show me another tree that’s as green and hardy and as — well, yes, it can be quite beautiful with some lovely flowers, and so what if they smell bad? (How would you smell if you grew up in all the rank places of the world?) — and as easily seeded in the saltiest, thinnest, most unwelcoming soils of our nation’s ugliest cities!

Instead of our contempt, ailanthus trees deserve our love and appreciation.

Well, they’ve got mine.

Hail the mighty and wonderful Ailanthus altissima, and may it grow forever!

So there!

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland free-lance writer. Her column appears in the Times-News on alternate Sundays.