Trees Get No Respect

A Royal Poinciana tree. Ours was much taller, but this looks like a great place to sit and think...

I have many wonderful early memories of trees... When we were much, much younger, my brother and I lived with our parents in a wonderful old neighborhood, perfect for a young loner like myself since there were no other kids around to torment me and, with only three other houses on our block, we were fairly surrounded by Florida underbrush and tall pine trees, one of which housed a nesting pair of bald eagles - plenty of room to roam and play. There was a giant white pine tree in front of our house where, with a little help from my mother, I would sit and survey my wild kingdom as I feasted on milk and Nabisco Vanilla Wafers. A decades-old Royal Poinciana tree shaded the entire back yard and in the spring would become festooned with giant red flowers. Yes, I have always been in love with trees.

Flowers of the Royal Poinciana tree

So when we got hit by a hurricane this summer, a tree came down in our back yard. This tree was part of a line of trees that sit between our house and the parking lot of an auto repair/gas station. During the summer, the young maples, staunch evergreens and a few deciduous trees leaf out and block the view of at least a dozen cars that are in various stages of being fixed; in the winter, we are forced to gaze on the parked cars and that's when I feel even more grateful to the trees for their gift of green.

Our poor tree after the storm

I've been complaining about the fallen tree still lying there, with several maple saplings crushed beneath it, for four months now. What I wanted was for the large tree to be put out of its misery and cut up into pieces, thereby releasing the maples and allowing them to be put back into the tree line-up. But that would be too ecologically sound. No: Instead, I looked outside last week only to see that someone had come while I was at work and cut them all up and took them all away, leaving a gaping hole that will allow me to see all the pretty cars and trucks behind us all year long. Thanks - no, really, thanks SO much.

The new view of the parking lot next door

This is what happens when you hire people who only know how to cut grass or someone who hacks off tree limbs for a living to do any intelligent landscaping or forestry management. They don't know that hacking up LIVING TREES just because they LOOK dead is idiotic (hey, they're maples - they lose their leaves in winter). Doing this takes away natural cover for wild animals and birds, as well as shade and oxygen, not to mention the fact that the roots soak up excess water, which we get in our back yard in abundance. And so ends another chapter of my new book, "WHY ARE PEOPLE SO STUPID?"

Some of the young maples just this past fall, after the storm

Something like this makes me want to go back to school and become a tree expert, or an arborist, or something! Then maybe I could convince people that we are abusing a very important element of our ecosystem.
 

The poor little stumps of what used to be a row of maple saplings

A couple of years ago, I decided to dig up a very invasive wild rose bush (it grows everywhere up here and, even though it put out sweet little pink flowers, it was annoying to have to cut it back almost daily) and, as I was huffing and puffing, the "yard monkeys" came to mow. One of them came up and, smiling (as if he was amused at my attempts to dig up anything) asked if I needed any help. I just looked at him and asked if he knew what plant I was digging up. He shrugged, and I asked if he knew what any of the plants in the yard were and he said, "Not really." That's when I said, "Then I don't guess I need any help." He smiled again and drove off on his very loud tractor mower (the one that leaves HUGE ruts in the yard each week, since the ground is too waterlogged to support the weight of him on his mechanical steed). Since we do not own our house or the property it sits upon, I can do little to change this lamentable situation.

A view of some trees at my mom's house in Florida, home to lots of wildlife

My mother's house in Florida sits on five acres of sand and scrub, with many tall pine trees and various deciduous trees that continually shed their leaves for new ones and drop copious amounts of inedible acorns every other year (I think those are the "live" oaks?). The dirt road that leads to the house is often impassable, and the people who live out there don't pay too much attention to cultivating fancy lawns or ornamental yards. My mom's property is home to at least one family of quail (or "bob-white") that cautiously emerge from the palmetto and wild blueberry bushes to forage for food; black bears pass through at night, heading to parts unknown; the squirrels are numerous and bold; turkey buzzards slowly float above the tree line looking for a quick meal; and the sandhill cranes fly somewhere overhead, piercing the humid air with their strange, rattling cries as they look for ponds and wetlands, their preferred feeding grounds. 

My mom's back yard in Florida

By not becoming too developed, this area has become, in a way, a wildlife preserve. The wind blowing through the pine needles makes a soft, sighing sound and the trees help block some of the heat from summer's unrelenting sun. Humans living harmoniously with the environment - that's how it should be.

This post has rambled on long enough, but I plan to return to this topic again soon. I have some ideas about how to promote better treatment of trees and I hope to share some of those stories right here.