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.

BIDDING FAREWELL TO MORE TREES

You won't believe what is happening at our house today. In fact, it was so disturbing to me that I left as quickly as I could this morning without so much as grabbing a photo of it first.

More trees are coming down. Does anyone else get that sick feeling in their stomach when they have to take down a tree, even when you really have no choice in the matter?

We've owned our house for a little over 12 years now and I bet we've taken down 20 trees in that time. It sort of sickens me. I can think of only maybe two that have come down for purely aesthetic reasons; trees that were failing but weren't in danger of falling on anything important.

This all started a couple weeks ago when we discovered that half a maple tree right on our lot line had fallen over in a big wind storm and landed on top of our neighbor's work forklift/cherry picker thing. We paid for the damage (ouch, but what are you going to do) and knew we needed to get the other half of that tree taken down quickly.

We have a great tree guy who I've sung the praises of before, but it doesn't pay to have him come out to just do one tree. Most of his cost is in assembling his crew and getting his equipment out. So if you can lump several trees into one visit the cost per tree goes down dramatically.

Here's a photo of our great tree guy when we had the huge birch tree cut down a couple years ago.

In addition to the half maple, we also had him take down a multi-trunked cedar tree that was hanging way over our neighbor's property. We don't want to take any chances.

Those two trees (or tree and a half as the case may be) are not terribly troubling losses. But the two others we had taken down today are.

One is a relatively large ash tree to the north of the house that, just by chance, we discovered was completely rotten last week. It obviously has not been in the best of health as it has been dropping branches and there's a lot of dead wood on the top, but it wasn't until last weekend that we found that you could stick your finger right into the trunk. I'm not sure what caused this. I peeled off the bark (which was easy to do as it was like a sponge) and did not find any sign of emerald ash borer, an exotic beetle that is decimating the ash tree population east of the Mississippi River and particularly in the Midwest. They leave winding paths under the bark of the tree (see photo below). Once a tree has emerald ash borers there is nothing that can be done to save it.

What damage from emerald ash borers looks like.

I noticed that there was a large nail in the trunk of the tree about 6 inches from the ground. I have no idea why it was put there but I wouldn't be surprised if that created a wound that helped allow whatever claimed its life to enter.

That ash tree probably would not have fallen on our house if it did topple. But it most certainly would have fallen on or gotten entangled with an even bigger ash tree to the east of it. This tree looked to be in mostly good health but almost two years ago our tree guy pointed out to us that it has an 8-foot-long longitudinal crack on the north side of it. We've been watching it carefully and in fall we noticed that two more cracks developed. And this big tree would absolutely crush our house if it came down in the direction in which it's leaning. Our tree guy gave us a really good deal to take it down at the same time as the other trees.

The broken tree that started it all.

Who knows, it might have been just fine for years, but after seeing the damage that half of a smaller tree caused to our neighbor's vehicle, I'm a bit paranoid about the whole idea of trees falling over.

Unfortunately the big tree was also my bird feeder tree. We'll have to find a new place to relocate the feeders to because the birds really need the food at this time of the year.

As for the future, I'm hoping we can find a large tree that will work in the area near where the ashes came down so we can get a start on the trees of the future. We still have a wooded area full of hundreds of trees, but I'm just not comfortable that I know our ratio of trees removed to trees planted is not where I'd like it to be.

The four trees we had removed today needed to come down, I have no doubt. But it doesn't make the sound of chainsaws and wood chippers any easier to bear and it won't make their absence any easier to get used to.