By Janice Lindsay, Contributing Writer
I's always sad to see an old tree cut down.
One raw late-winter day many years ago, arborists took down a grand, ancient pine tree in our yard. I don's remember all our reasons for this, but, once it was cut, we could see obvious signs of the internal rot that would have taken it anyway, probably tumbling huge limbs onto somebody's house. The decision to cut it down had been a good one.
That summer, sunflowers bloomed in what would have been the shade of that tree. No human planted them. Birds must have been taking sunflower seeds from our feeders and eating them in that tree. They would sometimes drop a seed. But the seeds had always landed in the tree's shade and had never received enough sun to grow. That year, seeds had been dropped before the tree was cut. Without the tree's shadow: sunflowers.
Those were our first and last sunflowers in that spot.
I think of this now because we'se in another house, and we'se just taken down another old tree, which stood very close, too close, to the house.
Unlike our old pine with its perfect canopy, this red oak was no beauty. It leaned several degrees. It was healing an old scar; perhaps it had been hit by lightening. It had been trimmed of branches dangerously close to our roof, so it was a bit unshapely. Even birds and squirrels rejected it; I never saw a nest of any kind in its branches.
Shortly after we moved in a few years ago, a retired forester of our acquaintance advised us to take the oak down before it fell. But we delayed. During every windy storm, I wondered whether this would be the day the old fellow finally took vengeance on the house that it probably felt had been built too close for its personal comfort. But the tree remained standing.
Finally, my husband got tired of cleaning up after it — all those acorns on the lawn that the squirrels didn's want, all those leaves clogging the roof gutters.
So I finally agreed we could take it down.
We watched the arborist high in the tree, cutting it into pieces. Branches were lowered to the ground, then limbs, then parts of the trunk, until only a short stump remained.
When the men left, I counted the rings on the stump. The oak was about 115 years old.
How presumptuous and arrogant of us, I thought, to take down this centenarian, who had been growing in that spot since my great-grandparents were young. Our land used to be a wood lot, so this oak had watched other trees come and go, had watched other people come and go, and had stood patiently, growing.
Then I looked at the trees nearby. Between our house and the neighbor's, there's a stand of woods about 60 feet wide. Our edge of the woods is a few feet beyond where the old oak stood.
I looked at those trees at the edge of the woods — young trees, mostly. They seemed to stretch their branches in relief and gratitude, as if finally, for the first time in their short lives, and from now on, they would enjoy whole years of sun, no longer shaded by their overbearing neighbor.
Maybe the trees weren's feeling grateful. Maybe that was my wishful thinking. But it's true that the young trees will now get more sun, and perhaps they'sl thrive.
You can's predict what might happen when you make a hard, sad decision. Sometimes you get sunflowers.
