Farewell young flora

In our woods reside some fairly old trees - mostly walnut and hackberry, with one cottonwood at the point in the woods that comes closest to the house. Any trees that we have planted are, by definition, young in my book as our house was built in 1999. Alas, I've had taken out two more of those young trees. This time, as was the case for a couple of other trees taken out a few years ago, one was dead; the other was wind damaged.

Farewell, Sugar Maple:

in 2020...                              and in it's youth (2006)....  

As you can see, the poor tree did not ever reach its potential. During it's first few years, the wind blew the leader out of it. Another branch grew into that role. Over the years, it accumulated impact damage to its trunk and it became diseased until the bark sloughed off around nearly the entire circumference. Too, it probably didn't help that the siting was unfortunate, being too near underground utility lines, I believe. Well...we probably shant replace that tree but focus on the trees in back. It isn't as if the tree was/could have been situated to provide shade to our house. With the house canted at a 45-degree angle to cardinal directions (facing northwest) and the driveway situated to the southwest of the house, that just cannot happen.

The next two photos show how the tree looks with utility-marking flags dancing about it. As you can see, it is a very good thing to have utility line locations marked before taking out a tree that sits atop some of those lines.

     

     

Farewell, clump of Redbud Trees:

in 2020...           and in January, 2017....

I just threw that photo in there to let me feel cooler than allowed by August weather; however, that ice storm was the genesis of problems with that clump. Since then, whenever we've had a stiff breeze (50 mph or faster) the clump lost large branches and/or a trunk. In addition, I've had to remove several large branches/trunks to allow clearance for Neighbor Adam and Hunky Husband when they are mowing. When it rained, the large leaves retained enough water to weigh the branches down to within a couple of feet of the grass.

Here is the clump, in March, 2019: 

It just caught my attention: there are yellow and orange streaks of paint in the grass of the above photo, indicating that, although the flags had been removed, we had had the utilities lines marked within the past couple of weeks. The next photo shows the currently installed dancing flags near the redbud clump.

Comments

[bogie]

Sad that those were beautiful just a couple of years ago, and now need to be removed.