The maples were all planted in 1948 by our beloved backdoor neighbor, Joe Wilson, a lineman for the telephone company who came home from World War II to marry Millie and buy the very first house built in our neighborhood. Joe and Millie lived downslope from the scraped lot where our house would be built two years later, and Joe was concerned about erosion. Maple trees have shallow roots that often rise above the surface of the ground, and Joe was counting on the 18 saplings he had planted to keep our soil in our own yard and out of his storm cellar.

The maples’ shallow roots have cost a few of them their lives. Joe and Millie lived out 65 years of happy marriage in the little house behind ours, but when they died, a developer bought the house and tore it down. In its place rose up the grand kind of house a telephone lineman will never again be able to buy in this ZIP code. The builder took no care to protect the glorious trees Joe and Millie left behind. And because tree roots don’t respect property lines, some of the builder’s heavy equipment and some of his heavy piles of brick and lumber got dumped on shallow roots that fed the trees in our yard.

This story has been unfolding all over our neighborhood for some time now, and all over the country, too. People buy houses in old neighborhoods, in part for the way the new houses are tucked among towering trees, for the shady bower in which the shiny new houses sit. When it becomes clear that the trees are sick, the worried homeowners call an arborist, who pronounces the trees beyond saving. It costs them thousands and thousands of dollars to take the old trees down and plant saplings in their place. In another 71 years, they will have shade again.

As a species, we seem to have evolved to form attachments to trees. One of the most affecting parts of Bruce Springsteen’s one-man show, “Springsteen on Broadway,” is the tale of a great copper beech tree the Boss had loved as a little boy and the grief he felt when he returned to his old neighborhood to find the old tree gone. In his memoir, “Born to Run,” Mr. Springsteen movingly describes the place the tree occupies in his imagination: “The very air and space above it was still filled with the form, soul and lifting presence of my old friend, its leaves and branches now outlined and shot through by evening stars and sky.”