The apple tree needed to be pruned. That much I knew. Its branches had grown long and tall and at least one high branch would drop its fruit behind the deer netting on the other side of the walkway. (I hope she forgives me.)
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| Overgrown apple tree, 2022 (Margo D. Beller) |
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| Pruned apple tree, 2023 (Margo D. Beller) |
The arborvitae to the side of the front door had also gotten too big. At one time I kept it pruned back but what with illness and age I stopped and so it grew as high as my second-floor office window. House sparrows would fight each other noisily in it outside my open window. Every so often I scared a cardinal or other bird out of it when checking the mailbox after dark. In winter it would bow low under the weight of the snow.
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| Overgrown arborvitae, 2022 (Margo D. Beller) |
All these trees needing work was expected. The dead ash tree was not.
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| Shortened arborvitae, 2023 (Margo D. Beller) |
I didn't even know it was an ash until the tree guy came to give me an estimate. He took one look and said it was a dead ash. The tree trunk was light brown and it was full of small holes I hadn't noticed before. When the leaves had come down a few months ago I thought the branches at the top didn't look healthy. I should've known something was up when a redbellied woodpecker started whacking at the tree trunk during the summer, no doubt smelling all the treats inside.
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| Overgrown pear tree, 2022 (Margo D. Beller) |
The ash stood near the property line with one of my neighbors, who had some of her trees cut down in November. She had left me a note, telling me the tree "near the pines" was "full of bugs." She offered to pay for cutting it down. Eventually I figured out the "pines" meant the yew hedge and the tree she meant was the one I had called the "weed tree" for decades.
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| Pruned pear tree, 2023 (Margo D. Beller) |
Why did the tree suddenly die? It was a victim of the emerald ash borer, native to Russia, Asia, Japan and South Korea. The first one came to the U.S. in a shipment from Asia in 2002. It was first sighted in Michigan. Now, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it has been reported in 36 states including New Jersey, where I live.
Ash borer infestation was the reason my county's park people chopped down a lot of infested ash trees growing on either side of one of my favorite hiking trails in the winter of 2018, leaving the fallen trees until the next spring. It was a horrific sight seeing all those dead or dying trees. And now my yard was similarly affected.
I've never liked this tree and I'd often thought about having it cut down. In the early years of my living here it would send up daughter trees from a root under the yew hedge, which meant I had to crawl under the hedge to cut them down. Its roots then switched direction and started coming to the surface next to and then through my ornamental grass garden, forcing me to walk carefully to avoid tripping when I did yard work. The roots even broke a sprinkler pipe next to one of the plants. (Luckily there was no leak and the pipe was fixed the next spring before the sprinkler was turned on.) Unlike the nearby cherry tree, the ash did not provide fruit but strings of seeds that fell in clusters.
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| Open sky where the ash used to be, 2023 (Margo D. Beller) |
I did not take my neighbor up on her kind offer. Instead, I called my own tree guy because, as I said, I had other trees that needed trimming anyway and I wanted to be sure any tree removal wouldn't affect the nearby plants. According to the guy who gave me the estimate, I have no other ash trees (or at least no trees that looked sick).
It took a tad over a month from the time I signed the contract before the work could be done, today. Four trucks arrived at 7:30 a.m. and it was all over less than 90 minutes later.
Looking out the back door, the first thing I noticed was the sky, a big hole where the tree used to be. I have written before about the "hole in the sky" created when a neighbor across the street took down a lot of trees. Whenever trees are cut the noise of saws and stump grinding bothers me, particularly if the tree being taken down appeared to me to be perfectly healthy but in the "wrong" place. An inconvenient tree. I'd shut the windows and try to block out the noise somehow, which was particularly aggravating when I was trying to work. I thought of the disruption to the birds and hoped no nests were destroyed in the process.
Today, on the New Year's Day (observed) holiday, when I was not working, the noise still agitated me, even though this was MY tree work being done and there are no birds nesting at this time of year to disrupt (tho' I'm sure they avoided the feeders while the work was going on). Here I was, doing the same thing I'd look down on my neighbors for doing. I know it was a dead tree but maybe they looked at the ash and thought it healthy and sniffed, "Another inconvenient tree."
Lesson learned.
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| Stump, 2023 (Margo D. Beller) |
Now, the cut apple and pear look neater. The last time the apple was trimmed it produced a bumper crop the next spring. The pear tree only sets flowers on old wood, so I'm hoping this cuts back on fruit. (It was to get a pear that a heavy bear once tried to climb that tree, only to break two-thirds of its lower branches.) Even the arborvitae doesn't look as bad as I feared.
As for the ash, I left the stump. Pulling it would've upended the nearby lilacs, cherry tree and plants in the ornamental grass garden. Eventually the roots will die and decompose. I tried to count the tree rings but got as far as 40 before stopping. The ash tree could've been planted when the house was built in 1964 or it might've been one of the lucky trees that survived when the meadow was cleared to build the houses on my suburban street.
Well, thanks to an invasive little insect from the other side of the world, its luck ran out.
