Avert your eyes!

Or suffer the consequences, all who look upon here. Trees so overly pruned and topped that they're no longer trees, but scary monsters! With spindly growths that desperately try to become tree-shaped again, only to be cruelly lopped off each year, like a kid getting buzzed with dad's clippers. Why don't these homeowners just rip out these stumps-that-used-to-be-trees, and plant some shrubs instead? Then shape them into perfect rectangles, spheres and cubes to their heart's content.

Oh, the humanity.

Symbolic Trees of Cinema - Alice in Wonderland

Tim Burton recently showed a trailer for his Alice movie (coming out in 2010) and here it is, featuring a big tree stump/rabbit hole and an older Alice revisiting her childhood haunts. Burton understands the imaginative world of trees from a child's point of view. Remember Sleepy Hollow?

Red Cedar - Oswald West State Park, OR

Chris Havel wrote about Oswald West State Park on his blog, Oregon State Parks last week. Up to 45 old-growth trees are dead or dying near the park's campground and the department had to decide if they should cut them down, or leave the park in its natural state but close the campground for good.

After weighing the pros and cons, they decided to leave the forest as is, close the campground, and remove a few trees that threatened buildings. For the good of the forest, its creatures and our general well-being--knowing there are still old-growth forests to visit, I think this was the wise decision.

photo source: OPRD
More about the park at GORP

Three Weird Sisters

Earlier in the week, I wrote of the wrong-headedness of topping a tree. These trees have been topped and are now doubling, tripling, and perhaps quadrupling their branch growth rates to "fill in" their hacked off main branches. So if they don't keep getting topped--they end up looking like the three weird sisters of a certain Shakespeare play--kind of bushy and over-grown. Topping your tree is like giving it a really short haircut--it's going to need to be trimmed back ever after.

Don't Top Your Trees!

Tree topping: ugly, misguided, counter-productive. When people lop off the tops of their tree branches, it's a pitiful shame and it butchers the tree. The Plant Amnesty site lists five good reasons not to top, including: It won't work; It's expensive; It's ugly; and It's dangerous.

If your tree is getting too big for your yard, hire an arborist to see what can be done. Better yet, do a lot of research on trees before you plant and plant appropriately. Sorry this post is so preachy, but I really feel bad for these trees! And their neighbors who have to look at them all the time.




- What is Topping and Why is it Bad? - Vancouver Parks & Recreation Department
- Trees Are Good - Why Topping Hurts Trees
- What's Bad About Tree Topping

Stormy Weather...

The Oregonian is a good source for gardening information. I always read the tree articles, of course. Here are a few from January.

We've had some major weather this winter. Record snowfall, windstorms (I was just at Beacon Rock this weekend and couldn't walk down the street due to wind--it was like being in a Buster Keaton film), and tree damage. Kym Pokorny's blog on OregonLive has a brief article on what to do with trees after a storm: Hire an arborist if you need to

Kym also reviews her favorite new gardening books, including Sean Hogan's "Trees for All Seasons: Broadleaved Evergreens for Temperate Climates."

How do you prune a Japanese maple anyway? Lisa Albert gives us an overview in How to prune a Japanese maple.

Birds are hungry in the winter. Make quick winter bird feeders for them.

Today's beautiful photo is of the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge by MemoryHunter; posted on the Oh, Snap! blog.
We drove down Highway 14 this weekend to explore this side of the river and it was windy, green and beautiful. The Columbia was choppy with white-caps all day. A visit to the Bonneville Dam was pretty interesting and quite rainbow colored within.

So you want the impossible...

When living in the Northwest, don't plant palm trees. You'll just have to wrap them in plastic during an atypical (or typical) harsh winter, and even if you don't--they look silly next to Douglas Firs.

Symbolic Trees of Cinema - "Pan's Labyrinth" 2006

In Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," Ofelia is living in fascist Spain--a brutal time in Spanish history. Her fantasy world helps her escape. She's given some tasks to prove herself, one of which is to save this dying tree from the creature within that's causing its destruction. Not many film heroines get to save a tree. Hat's off to this fearless little girl.

Park Ave. Trees, Portland OR

A Park Ave. tree fell over onto an arts-related building last week. I couldn't find the photo of it on OregonLive (terrible search engine over there), but here's some upright trees from about a month ago. There's been ridiculous amounts of snow, wind and rain for the past few weeks, so trees are reacting.

A big fir tree branch fell on our roof while we were gone and somehow slid down onto the fireplace flue on the side of the house. Luckily only the protective metal mesh casing was dinged. The flue seems fine. Our roof is covered in greenery and I'll have to get up there and brush everything away. The former owners of our house left two huge Douglas Firs growing next to our house. They're very nice but they can be ominous, especially during severe weather systems.

OregonLive has a story on storm damage to local nurseries' greenhouses. Some Japanese maples didn't make it. Sad. Now that torrential rains are expected, flooding may begin. Already a few houses have washed down hillsides or been blown through by sliding debris. Miraculously--no one has been seriously injured, even while escaping slides from inside the homes. Harrowing stuff.

California Palm

I was actually trying to get a photo of my son's Stomp Rocket going up in the air, which of course, was impossible, using a camera phone. But this unintentionally and annoyingly arty photo did manage to capture one of my pet peeves: a Northern California palm tree. Unless they're growing in a row down the middle of Dolores Street in San Francisco, palm trees in Northern California look mentally challenged to me. They are so non-native and weird looking and they're often planted right next to a California Oak, or even an evergreen. Awful. This view is tiny and about all I can take of the things. People, please--no more palms in Northern California.

A (dark, blurry) Stomp Rocket in action.

Big Lots Christmas is Upon Us!

I actually took these BEFORE Halloween at our local Big Lots! store. I couldn't bring myself to post them here until after Thanksgiving (of course, that didn't stop me from posting them elsewhere to make a point about commercialism, capitalism and Christmasism). It has been noted that these resemble the lot of aluminum trees in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" that causes Charlie Brown to become so depressed that he buys a raggedy little tree that needs a little love, further alienating him from his antagonistic peers. Get down to Big Lots! before they're all bought up!

Badass Trees of Cinema - The Sleepy Hollow Cherry Tree

It's been a while since I saw Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow." I remember looking forward to it because I was hoping a coherent story would be in Tim's grasp, since it's based on a coherent story by Washington Irving. Alas, Burton, true to form, gets it all muddled as usual. Nice set design and costumes, as always.

Here's a fine example of a badass tree of cinema: the cherry tree where Christopher Walken's headless horsemen comes bursting forth like a headless bat out of hell. The tree is a true Tim Burton creation, shaped in the curly-que that he tends to favor. And if I remember correctly, it swallows souls of the headless horseman's victims, so it's got some gruesome shots that I won't spoil here. It's all pretty badass, for a tree.


Johnny Depp basically acts scared through the entire film, but looks good doing it.

I'm a land owner

I recently discovered that we own and are responsible for a long patch of hardened, weed-infested roadside dirt along our flagship drive, which passes two other houses off our cul-de-sac. After I got over the shock of being a land owner of useless land, I realized that all these months of ruefully watching a Grimms fairy-tale thicket of wild blackberry vines taking over the entire street was actually NOT my neighbor's problem. It was mine. Being pragmatic, I look upon this as an ongoing project and will probably keep you posted here, just for my own sense of accomplishment.

Here' some "before" photos, shot in near-dark and pretty dreadful, unless you want to look at them as "arty," or as reflecting my state of mind when I first admitted to myself that I am a land owner.

Here's the road. My property is the road itself (even though my next-door neighbor uses it every day to get in and out of her house), all along the left, and along the right, but the neighbors with the adjacent lawn just spray the right side with weed killer every year. Note the dead border along their lawn. Nice. I'm not responsiblef for the Tim Burton-esque falling-down fences along the road. Thank god.

Here's a tangle of blackberry vines with seasonally dead leaves. I waited until they all frosted over, died and fell from the vines. Then I got on my work gloves and set to snipping. I snipped every vine and loaded up two large bins for recycling day. Now I have to either dig up the roots (impossible), spray with Round-up (not a good plan, ecologically speaking), or plan C: trim the cut-down vines to the ground, cover with layers of newspaper and/or cardboard (weighted down with a rock), then layer over that a thick mulch made from chopped up leaves from my back yard. A multi-step and physically taxing plan, but I'm giving it a go. Good exercise!
Here's your daily tree. It was a bush that I've been trimming into more of a tree shape. I have no idea what kind of plant this is. Long, thorny shoots, large, red cherry-like fruit that's hard as rocks--pretty ugly and useless. But I'll keep it for a while because it's nice to have a roadside tree, however weird.
Close-up of fruit. It arrives in Fall and lingers and never seems to ripen. My tree identification Web sites aren't helping on this one. Whatever it is, I'm sure it's some kind of invasive thing that a bird dropped from its nether regions, like all the blackberry vines.

I can't blame the birds for the gigantic, half-dead Scotch Brooms I cut back a few months ago. Scotch Broom is considered an invasive plant in the Northwest, and sure enough, I'm constantly pulling out tough little mini brooms that spawned from the two big ones I've chopped down (one was so dead, I could just tear it apart with my hands--fun). They bloom a lovely yellow for a short time per year, but keep them out of your yard. They spread and have no predators so they quickly take over, choking back native and nonnative plants alike.

Badass Trees of Cinema - The Whomping Willow

From "Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets." Harry, Ron, do not mess with the Whomping Willow!

Ghost Trees

My friend Laurie and I visited the Hoyt Arboretum earlier in September. There's a kind of killer fungus that's hitting some of the conifers. The park employees are cutting down the trees that are hard hit, so it won't spread, but these two have passed on.

The path through the redwoods smells really woodsy and it's very shady in there. We couldn't even follow our simple map to make a loop. But we made our way around OK. Someone put a tiny doll's tea set high up in the crook of a tree. I tried to get a photo but it was near the end of the day and too dark.

If you look in the upper left corner, you might make out a ghostly little table, set for tea.

It's Fall foliage time at the Hoyt Arboretum.

This shouldn't happen to a tree

Our neighbors took drastic measures to thin out their Douglas Firs, making them look like pointed palms. In this case, you might as well GO ALL THE WAY and chop them down. This is not much of a look for an evergreen, especially in an area full of very tall, full greenery.

To make it more mysterious, some kind of incredibly loud creature used to live in one of these trees, shrieking every afternoon from 2 to 4 p.m. I never got a glimpse of this animal, but it sounded much like what I imagine a pterodactyl might have. It's gone now. Too embarrassed to live in something out of a Dr. Seusss tragedy. It sounded something like: HYAAAAAAAAACHHHHHHH!!! CHYRAAAAAAAAAACCCCHHHH!!!

I don't miss that.



Update: I talked to the little girl who lives in this house and she told me the sounds were coming from their pet cockatoo, who was caged in the backyard. They've since sold it (to whom, I wonder?) and now all we hear is her long-haired dachsund, yapping and howing the live long day.

Please enjoy this video of Snowball the dancing cockatoo. He's really quite good.

When Trees Are Gross

Our neighbor's Birch has gigantic nests of what appear to be caterpillar colonies, hanging like gossamer hammocks from above. This one isn't even the biggest cluster in this tree. There's one that looks like it has thousands of dormant worm-shaped creatures, just hanging there. It's ominous.

My Aunt had a similar situation in Seattle a number of years ago. Something was hanging up in her tree and when it broke open, tens of thousands of caterpillars came raining down. She had to call an exterminator and she felt like she was in a gardening horror film.

I've decided to cross off "Birch" from my tree-planting list.

Update: I recently read in the Oregonian that these particular caterpillars are harmless to the tree if they show up near the end of summer/beginning of fall. They'll eat the leaves but the tree will survive. It's when they show up in the beginning of summer that you've got to panic. I mean, you've got to get rid of them, by pruning and tossing.

When Trees Destroy

This tree in front of our house is destroying our neighbor's fence. I feel bad about it, but look how huge it is. How much does it cost to erradicate a tree this size? I'm afraid to find out. There was an attempt to dig up a root that might have been causing the problem, but a few months later, the fence just bent back once more.