By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

Many years ago I planted a pair of ‘Shirotae’ (‘Fuji’) cherries just outside my dining room window. They grew as quickly as I hoped they would, giving me lovely fringed, blush-white flowers in spring and yellow-orange leaves in fall. Within a few years, I noticed a pair of red-breasted sapsuckers drilling neat holes around the trunks of both trees. My fear was that they’d kill the trees, but I liked the birds so much I left them alone.

I was glad I did. The sapsuckers nested in my garden for most of the years that I lived in that house, and though the trunks soon looked like pegboards, the trees never failed to flower, leaf out, and color up on schedule.

It occurs to me that each of the bare-root cherries cost me about the same amount of money as a good bird feeder. The difference was that, for the same price, the trees added a lot to my garden and didn’t have to be restocked with food every couple of weeks.

Since those days, I've moved to another house in the same neighborhood. I still hang suet feeders in my current garden, and they regularly attract four kinds of woodpeckers. But I don’t have 'Shirotae' cherry trees here—or sapsuckers. The connection is unmistakable, and this bare-root season, I hope to bring back the cherries and, with them, the sapsuckers.