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Silly me. I had yet to learn of the arboreal rivalries that occur in an urban setting.

Like animals in a zoo, trees on a city lot are not free to roam as they do in the wild. They must stay captive in their enclosures. Of course, you have a better chance of keeping a tiger in a chicken coop than the limbs of a spreading chestnut tree in its own backyard.

Therein lies the root of many neighborhood feuds. A fence is not enough to make good neighbors. Apparently, you need a chain saw.

My trees, like my 1940s-era house, were a bit tattered and worn when I acquired them. The gnarled apple tree does not produce what you would call a bumper crop. A few mealy fruits grow at the top limbs where only squirrels and raccoons can harvest them.

Yet the branches flower beautifully in spring and offer privacy between my neighbor’s house and mine.

One neighbor does not mind the branch tips kissing her upper deck. I have the same attitude when her wisteria vine takes a wrong turn into my hawthorn tree.

My neighbor and I are of the same generation: she a widow, I an empty-nester. We live alone and share an understanding of things that grow beyond our control.

Not all neighbors are so obliging, especially the nouveau homeowners. That is why I am secretly gratified that the giant oak in the yard behind me toppled in a winter storm.

I should feel ashamed. I live in Berkeley, Calif., a city that loves its trees so much that a flock of protestors nested in a redwood grove for nearly two years to keep the university from cutting it down.

I wasn’t home when the great oak in my neighborhood fell, so I didn’t have the satisfaction of hearing the mighty thud it must have made when it hit the dirt.

But there it was on New Year’s Day – prone, horizontal, with a giant ball of roots reaching up into the sky like some evil fairy-tale crone’s gnarled, grasping fingers.

This oak had been battling for decades over the fence with my Chinese elm. Despite this ongoing struggle for sunlight and fresh air, the elm grew like an umbrella over my backyard.

When I look out my windows or sit on my deck, I feel I am living in a treehouse without having to climb. So you can imagine my reluctance to cut it down when the neighbors suggested it. Even my periodic appeasement pruning broke my heart.

Then nature finally settled the debate, and my elm tree triumphed. The rivalry of trunks and branches, however, did not end. In the opposite corner of my yard, a plum tree lives at the intersection of three lot lines. In February, it produces a crown of pink blossoms always in time for Chinese New Year.

When early spring winds rage against it, the blossoms sprinkle the ground with a confetti of petals. Soon deep-burgundy leaves follow and then tiny, purple plums.

In winter, the dark, naked branches throw intricate patterns against the peach-sherbet Pacific sunsets. This is a tree that earns its keep year-round.

Imagine my indignation when the new owners of one of the houses demanded I cut it down. The young wife laid out her arguments on my front porch. She had planted a tree of her own right up against the back fence, less than a foot from my plum, and now she wanted my taller, older tree cut down so her new one could grow.

“Besides,” she said smugly, “your tree is dead. All the leaves dropped off.”

“Have you never heard the word ‘deciduous’?” I thought to myself.

“My tree has seniority,” I said. “I am never cutting it down.”

Of course her space-hogging tree has grown and crowds my elderly plum’s space. It produces no fruit, no blossoms; it just grows green with a sense of youthful entitlement more obvious season after boring season.

Each morning as I drink my coffee, I’ve taken to staring critically at my plum tree. Yes, I admit she is slowing down some. Spring brought fewer blossoms, summer fewer fruits. The lichen on some of the branches seems to be spreading.

Yes, the plum tree is not what she once was. Perhaps this will be the winter when a fierce storm takes her down like the mighty oak. Nature will take its course, but I will not hurry it along.

“Don’t worry, old girl,” I say each morning as I enjoy her silent swaying on the autumn breeze. “I know you’re doing your best.”

For in the end, resilience, tenacity, and dependability have to count for something, even in a tree. So I will stand by my plum as long as she can stand.

And quietly I hope someone does the same for me as I grow old beside her.

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Mendocino County, about 90 miles north of San Francisco, hosts a Mushroom Festival, Nov. 7-16,  with hunts for chanterelles, porcinis, morels, and rarer varieties such as the candy cap and hedgehog mushroom. Mushroom-themed dinners are offered throughout the area, along with mushroom cooking classes and a seminar on the healing power of mushrooms.

The Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardenhosts mushroom walks on Mondays between Nov. 17 and Jan. 26, at 1:30 p.m., and mushroom identification workshops, Nov. 22 and 29 and Dec. 20, . Other events include a Mushroom Exhibit at the Ford House Museum in Mendocino Village and a mushroom train ride, Nov. 15, departing Fort Bragg or Willits Depot, on the Skunk Train.

On Vancouver Island in British Columbia, the Aerie Resort hosts a half-day Great Fall Mushroom Hunt each Saturday in October. The cost is about $125 ($130 Canadian) and includes transportation from the resort to forested hunting areas and a three-course lunch.

Also on Vancouver Island’s west coast, the annual Bamfield Mushroom Festivaltakes place Oct. 18 in Bamfield with events including a mushroom hunt, mushroom derby, dinner, and dance.

On Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula, the Wild Mushroom Celebrationincludes a month of mushroom-centric dinners and tastings, from an Oct. 10 dinner at the Depot Restaurant in Seaview to a Nov. 6 dinner at the Tuscany Cafe at the Port of Ilwaco.

The Lake Quinault Lodge in Washington’s Olympic National Forest hosts the Quinault Rain Forest Mushroom Festival, Oct. 17-19.  The event features mushroom walks, mushroom collecting seminars, cooking and identification classes, tips for growing mushrooms, and activities for kids.

The Wild About Mushrooms Co., based in Forestville, Calif., offers mushroom-themed trips including the Oregon Cascades Foray, Oct. 12-16, which includes hunting for chanterelles, porcini, matsutake, lion’s mane, and other varieties.

Madisonville, Texas, about 90 minutes from Houston, calls itself the “Mushroom Capital of Texas” and is hosting a Mushroom Festivalon Oct. 25, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. The event includes cooking demonstrations; arts, crafts, and food vendors; and a Shiitake 5K Run/Walk.

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Terra Nostra Park, a 31-acre public garden in Furnas, an old resort village on the largest island in the Azores, can claim all of these hallmarks of aged beauty.

The gardens also contain water in all its Picturesque-style forms: a lagoon, canals, streams, and ponds. Terra Nostra (“Our Land,” in Portuguese) is as deliberately drenched in romance and mystery as it is in sensory pleasures – color, fragrance, and the various sounds of water.

The Picturesque, a garden type that evolved on the estates of English nobility in the late 18th century and spread to continental Europe and America, emphasized a sequence of carefully composed scenes.

As visitors strolled on foot (or rode in a carriage) along a winding path, each turn revealed a delightful new picture.

Like most things in the Azores, a string of volcanic islands more than 900 miles from mainland Europe, this garden type was imported. The first to settle on this property was Thomas Hickling, a merchant from Boston and the US consul on São Miguel.

In 1780, Hickling built a modest wooden house on about five acres of land, where he planted trees from North America. (The island has a moist, temperate climate, with year-round temperatures ranging only between the high 50s and the high 70s (F.).) Today, the only tree old enough to have been planted by Hickling is an English oak.

In the mid-19th century, the estate’s next owner, the Viscount of Praia, replaced the house with a larger mansion. The viscount also added more land and created formal gardens featuring water, groves of trees, and patterned flower beds.

But it was his son, the second Viscount of Praia, who, with the help of British and Portuguese garden designers, developed the Picturesque features, including the lagoons. Many of the trees they planted, imported from all over the world, still survive. The oldest of them are approaching 140 years old.

The hotelier Vasco Bensaude acquired the garden after he built the art deco Terra Nostra Hotel in the 1930s, and he and his head gardener, John McEnroy, continued expanding and restoring the plant collections.

In 1990, Mr. Bensaude’s son, Filipe, oversaw yet another expansion and refurbishment. Although they opened the garden to the public, the Bensaude family still maintains it and still owns the Hotel Terra Nostra.

The current Terra Nostra Park brochure announces, “You are about to discover a 200-year-old garden.” Discovery applies to the garden’s botanical collections as well as its design.

Nourished by the ocean mist and, perhaps, by the warmth of the underground volcanic springs – hotel guests can soak in a pool of hot, ochre-colored water near the garden – diverse temperate plant species thrive, creating startling juxtapositions: camellias and tree ferns (cycads), gingkos and palms, red oaks and Norfolk Island pines.

Around each bend lies a new view and another choice: Should you take the left fork to the lower level, or the right fork ascending the bank? Are glimmers of water enticing your eye, or the dark, cool foliage of the grove?

Entering the garden near the sulfurous pool, visitors tend to climb the pyramid-shaped mound to the white stucco mansion, a vantage point that reveals a placid pond where swans and exotic ducks float. Also from here, the viewer can glimpse a canal flowing into the pond.

Descending again, the path rounds the corner of the steeply sloping mound, leading the visitor through a grove of tree ferns. The pond’s surface glitters below, screened by the enormous lacy fronds.

As David Sayers, a British-born gardener and horticulturist who has worked on these gardens, writes in the sole Azores guidebook (Bradt Travel Guides), cycads “would have been browsed by dinosaurs.”

Planted thematically throughout the park, they create a primeval air. Their fronds unfurl from fiddleheads as big as salad plates.

More steps descend from this middle terrace to the water, and the pond narrows into a lagoon. The moss-edged path leads to a vine-draped opening at the base of the bridge, and behind the curtain of green, the sound of trickling water beckons. Inside lies a perfect grotto hollowed out of rough volcanic rock.

A tiny waterfall spills down the rear wall, cloaked by maidenhair ferns.

Among other delights are the allées, which form some of the garden’s few straight lines and comprise its chief architecture. In counterpoint to the whimsical, curving paths, they feel restfully sedate.

Off of these, hidden garden rooms contain collections – camellias, cycads, rhododendrons (among them a rare Malaysian species), ferns, azaleas, and hydrangeas.

These are among the newer additions, and although they no doubt add botanical interest, their design lacks the charm of the garden’s older core. But this is a small quibble, given the extraordinary variety of botanical and spatial experiences here.

The overall effect is of a marvelous garden salad, tossed by the Atlantic breeze.

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