A love story planted in Bellingham

STORY BY HALEE HASTAD | PHOTO BY TOMMY CALDERON

It is April 15, 1896 and Arbor Day celebrations are in full swing. Mayor, Eli Wilkins, has commissioned the planting of hundreds of trees as a way to beautify Fairhaven, a neighborhood south of Bellingham, Washington, that had been logged-out for development only seven years before.

Fast-forward to 2015.

Bellingham is now a Tree City USA community. It is recognized nationally as having a citizen-based effort to sustain the urban forest and has honored Arbor Day annually for 119-years.

But the Arbor Day trees are not the ones with historic value in the area.

There are two trees, white as marble, that stand at the gate of a red home with white trim in Fairhaven.

They were planted in 1917 as an endowment for a newly engaged Swedish couple hoping to start a prosperous life in the United States.

“I didn’t buy the house,” Keller says with a smile. “I bought the two trees in front of it.”

A young man had arrived in Fairhaven from Sweden to search for work that would allow him to support his wife-to-be and the hopes of a family. It wasn’t long before he found a job as a fisherman in the Bellingham Bay and sent for his love.

Back in Sweden, his fiancée was packing to board a ship that would take her away from a home she knew she would never see again.

Her mother and grandmother wanted to send her off with something that she could always remember them by — a piece of familiarity to take with her to a place that seemed worlds away.

They gave her two Birch Bark saplings wrapped in a dampened cloth. She was to keep the young trees with her on the journey and plant them deep in the soil of a new land.

When she arrived she buried the roots of the small trees next to each other, a symbol of her and her lover, where they still stand today.

Bob Keller and Pat Karlberg now live in the red home with white trim and have the pleasure of owning the nearly 100-year old trees.

They tell the story of the young couple and the trees as if it was their own — with passion and an occasional disagreement on the facts.

The birches rest watchfully at either side of a gate now, accompanied by a hand- made Swedish bell to welcome guests. One of them still stands tall while the other is a modest 10-foot stump, the casualty of a windstorm.

Bob and Pat value the presence and history of the trees, they say. In a way, they feel connected to the Swedish lovers that first planted them and appreciate being able to find a connection to the past through the trees existence.

“I didn’t buy the house,” Keller says with a smile. “I bought the two trees in front of it.”

The Arbor Day celebrations may have been the beginning of a tree-conscious community but fundamentally, they possess deeper meaning. Trees hold the earth together, just as personal connections bind one human to another. They are the silent curators of days gone by and noble markers of history.