the house where trees come to die

Recent events have caused me to reflect, and it's come to my attention that we have a tree concentration camp here. We might be single-handedly responsible for global warming. Does Al Gore know about us? Please don't give him our phone number.

We had a couple of lovely birch trees in our front lawn when we bought this house 10 years ago, and a few years later they died, very suddenly and completely, so that one day John just went outside and pushed them over. With the addition to our house years after that, those trees would have needed to be removed anyway and we have planted a new one out front in their place, but still. Two suddenly dead previously fine-looking trees.

But the curse on our trees was just getting started. Then another tree died in the corner of our yard, near the play structure that John built, and then the one next to it died too. That was a couple of years ago. Around that time, our beloved, huge, prolific apple tree started looking funny. And the apple crop that year was extremely wormy and many of the apples were inedible. And over the last two years it's become more and more obvious that our apple tree was going too. This really was a great tree. Pretty and just perfect apples for pies and applesauce. John took a sick-looking branch to a fancy nursery at one point and was told the tree is too far gone to help.

Yesterday, Allison rushed into the house from the backyard shouting, "The WHOLE apple tree just fell over!" Well, what's left of it anyway. A good half of it no longer had leaves.

And there it was, our formerly beautiful, shady apple tree.



It clearly had termite damage, though our house had no signs of termites two years ago at our big remodel. Maybe the termites moved in
after it had become very sick. Maybe they caused it. We don't know.


So John got out his power saw and wasted no time in cutting it up, and it was very sad to see it go.



And then he looked over a new problem we've been discussing, another dead tree in our backyard.


None of this does much to make our backyard look attractive for potential buyers in the near future. Our formerly fully-landscaped backyard is now nearly devoid of shade and empty.

And we have four HUGE, mature redwoods on our property in our new house. If this bad tree karma follows us there we are going to be in for some serious trouble.