A TREE CASUALTY

Last week I lamented the loss of more trees in our yard. The difference of the missing ash trees is dramatic. But they are gone and that’s all there is to it. I’m trying to look at this as an opportunity to plant something big and beautiful like a copper beech, a Kentucky coffeetree or any other from the amazing variety of large trees out there. You don’t get a lot of opportunities to plant big trees in this life, so I want to make it good. And it probably won’t be a maple (more on that in a future post).

There is a huge pile of wood waiting for a friend to pick up. He heats his house almost exclusively with a wood-burning stove so he’s happy to take any wood we can get him. We don’t have fires very often so we have plenty of wood stacked and ready to use to keep us stocked for some time.

I’m not thrilled that the tree crew stacked the wood at the base of my favorite old beech tree because I worry about soil compaction, disease and trunk damage, but I think the wood is supposed to be picked up this coming weekend so I think it will be ok.

What’s not OK, unfortunately is that for the first time in the many years we’ve had these guys cut trees for us, they damaged an existed tree.

My poor little Gingko biloba ‘Golden spire’ bit the dust. I bought it from Klehm’s Song Sparrow nursery on clearance a couple years ago and it lived its entire short life in a cage to protect it from deer.

This cage has seen better days.

From the state of the cage, it’s obvious that they dropped a branch or part of a trunk right on top of it, snapping off the tree it was protecting.

I’m not happy about it, but if they had to damage something, it was a good tree to pick. The tree never had a central leader by the time I got it for about $25, so I was working on training a branch to take over that duty. I suspect the tree was never going to be very pretty. I’m not convinced I sited it correctly either.

So I get a do-over on that one. Maybe it was fate that brought that ash branch down on the poor little gingko. Either way it will give me something to work on after the holidays when I can plan out that area. Again.