A Grower Perspective

This has been an interesting tree week for me, as in trees going down. In the nursery business we are into planting trees but there are times when trees have to come down as well. The first tree to come down was a Grand Fir (Abies grandis) in front of our rural home near the road.  This tree had suffered since the road was paved in 1994 and recovered a bit but never returned to its original vigor. It had been on our list of things to do for quite some time and the day came that we had the time and energy to do it. The fragrance of Grand Fir is quite intense and smells like the Christmas season, I love it. The trunk was cut up for fire wood and will heat our home for a winter. For me there is always some emotion of sadness when a tree goes. The Grand Fir went and ready to take the place was a Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziessi) I planted a few years ago.

So the changes in the landscape go on. The second tree, a cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa), came down in our friends rural garden. This tree was huge, and a year ago we hailed its great beauty and stature in the garden. As cottonwoods do, it had been taking over the area around it for years including the vegetable garden area, so much so that the vegetables were stunted as the tree sucked up all the water. We moved the vegetable garden. Then in June the tornado storm moved through Crow and tore apart the cottonwood and the rest of the garden. The tree looked rough and huge branches hung off ripped from the trunk. It was time for it to go down, now with less sadness than before because of its root invasiveness and the damage caused by the storm. This was a job for a large tree specialist. The tree has two main trunks, one went down on Tuesday and then on Friday the other will go down. This was a huge chainsaw job that landed the tree with an earth moving thud as the trunk hit the ground and then it took three people to clean up the branches. I pulled off a bit of bark and it was saturated with water, the core of the tree was sopping wet when touched. This tree is a water storage tower. The trunk of this tree was hauled away in hopes someone will want it for lumber. I had a 1966 3/4; ton Chevrolet pick up and the bed of this truck was cottonwood, so it does have a milled use. We also took sheets of moss off the branches and trunk to add to the garden. What beautiful material! There is a pleasant openness and everything in the cottonwoods sphere of influence will have a chance at the space and water now. There is amazing power and mass in the uprightness of a tree as well as when it is laying on the ground. I felt like an ant next to a blade of grass near these two trees.