Do Trees Count?

I’m not a gardener. At least I don’t claim to be one. But sometimes I wonder where does the label start and end?
I plant trees.
A maple at the first house we rented as newlyweds. A whole grove of aspens at the first house we bought (there are still one or two left-patriarchs of the neighborhood, now). A Royal Maple, a Jacquemontii Birch (it should still count even though it died-the ground squirrels ate the roots back to the trunk), a Laurel Leaf Willow (that took over the front of the house), another Maple (brought home from school by our youngest child in a pint milk carton as an Arbor Day gift), a Curly Maple (salvaged from the table arrangements of our nephew’s [or was it our niece’s?] wedding) were all planted on the property of the first home we built for ourselves.
I also prune the trees.
I shape them, some whimsically, but most for health and aesthetics. A very few, such as my Mother’s and Mother-in-law’s get pruned for fruit production.
I like trees.
I think this comes from my childhood. I remember the very first tree that I climbed all on my own. I couldn’t have been more than five years old. My six year old sister insisted that I show her how to climb it, too. I did. I just neglected to show her how to climb down. None the less, I’ve been climbing trees ever since. The Columbus Day storm in 1962 was a heart breaker for me because my parents had a HUGE (of course it was huge-I was only 7) walnut tree that got lifted up out of the ground so that the roots were showing all around and Dad would no longer let us climb it. He said it was too dangerous.
Two houses later, my parents moved us into a neighborhood with trees with houses in them, and I fell in love. With tree houses! Okay, none of them were particularly elaborate. They were fortunate to have solid floors let alone walls or roofs, but to me they were adventure personified! I couldn’t have articulated that thought. All I knew was that I wanted my very own tree house. I would have been satisfied with a single platform. Walls and roofs , let alone access stairs, ladders or ropes were inconsequential. It was all about being up above in a space of my own free of those cares affecting the pedestrians tied to the ground below.
I fell in love with tree houses as soon as I saw my first one. Not any particular tree house-all of them! But it wasn’t until my first nephew reached climbing age that I actually built a tree house on my own of my own design. There were two offset platforms with rails accessed by rungs up the trunk. But it was his not mine. As my own children grew to the climbing age, I ended up designing a fourteen foot two story tower with a hanging bridge, trap door, beam walk, rope slide, and detached platform because I had no trees that were capable of being built into, onto or around. I’m sure they enjoyed the play structure, but it wasn’t really a tree house.
None of the trees I’ve planted have yet matured to house building stature. Maybe none ever will while I’m alive to see them. I still haven’t found the tree of my dreams in which to build my sanctuary. I’ll keep looking and I’ll keep planting trees, but I still don’t think that makes me a gardener.