Bent over Birch Trees October Snowmageddon storm
So yesterday I had the sad task of whacking three out of five birch trees planted by my wife twenty or so years ago. Taylor Davis came over to give an estimate on some landscaping work and shook his head when I asked about the likely hood of the trees straitening back up via the summer sun.
The town did relatively well recovering from the storm, spending $426,000 of which 75% will be reimbursed by the state. That $319,500 will go a long way towards paying off the $612,000 capital item for 2,000 new trees over the next three years.
well i recommended my folks keep their bent birch, and 20 years later it is still there
ReplyDeletebut in robert frost's town....death to the birches
~the cornell horticulture graduate
And still bent. I'll bet it did not straighten up.
ReplyDelete8:23. no it didn't straighten out. it lived. birches bend. to deny that and cut them down because it doesn't suit man's aesthetic ego is precisely what is wrong with humanity. life is majestic in all forms, and my still living bent birch is a testament to that appreciation. now go get in your hummer and bring me a Starbucks coffee.
DeleteAs to bent Birch, I am a firm believer in the block & tackle. If you distribute the load over the length of the tree well enough, have a solid object on the other end to hook to, and keep slowly tightening the line over time, the tree has no choice but to go the way it is being pulled.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Birch is also a "pioneer plant" -- a tree that doesn't live all that long and in nature creates a ecosystem more suited toward the hardwoods. And thus, long term, cut & replace is not all bad in that 20 years from now you will have Birches there.
Having said that, know of anyone with some Maple or Oak that they want to get rid of without having to pay the disposal fee?
I'd love to go clean up the Puffer's Pond/State Street conservation area or Amherst College's land around their observatory -- leaving neat piles of the small branches & softwood near the road for eventual removal but eliminating what is a potential wildfire hazard. Any idea how to do this "legally" and "with permission"?
birches bend. to deny that and cut them down because it doesn't suit man's aesthetic ego is precisely what is wrong with humanity
ReplyDeleteAnd this stupidity, writ large, is how we wind up with an "asphalt jungle."
There are a lot of trees in this town that simply need to COME DOWN. The Oaks on Kellogg Avenue come to mind, and the only reason they survived the October storm is that they are so nearly dead that they didn't have enough leaves to catch the snow.
Right now, Amherst has a tree cover that was largely planted after (or quite young during) the 1938 hurricane -- nearly 80 years ago. Trees 75-100 years old, approaching the end of their expected lifespans.
You need to cut down 10%20% of the worst and replant, and do that every decade so that you have a diversity of tree cover throughout the town. Then when (not if) we get another Hurricane of 1938 -- a storm that will make the October snow look like noting -- then you have SOME trees that survive it.
Trees exist to please me, not I them. I enjoy them, but some of them do need to come down -- the Boy Scouts have a term: "Widowmakers" -- and when you realize what some of these things weigh, and how badly rotted they are inside, and how little solid wood is holding up all that weight, well it wasn't the two pine trees by my apartment that I made a fuss about, those had to go.