Our trees

It's a new set of symptoms every day! I'm still feeling awful but the specific things affecting me change from day to day. Yesterday, for example, my throat was very sore. Today I woke up with my right eye sealed shut and a much milder sore throat. Who knows what I'll feel like when I wake up tomorrow?

The only constants are the slight cough, the off-and-on headache, and the exhaustion. Between the exhaustion and today's extremely goopy eyes I canceled metalsmithing today and my psychologist's appointment tomorrow. I figure it was best to stay home and rest.

I had to take time out of resting to meet with the arborist we'd called. We have a ton of trees on the property and not all of them seemed to us to be doing well. We were right: they're not doing well.

We have ten European birch trees on the property and all of them are heavily infested with birch borers and have to come down. All of them. If the previous owner had planted birch trees that actually grow in this region the trees wouldn't have been as susceptible to the borer. However, this variety of birch tree grows really quickly, which is probably why the previous owners planted them.

We also have three mysteriously diseased fir trees that need to come down both because they're dying and because they were planted too close together. There are also a number of spruce trees on the property that were planted too close together. Two of them have spruce gall and we're going to have them come down to thin out the trees and because they're kind of ugly with the gall. Removing one of them will leave a privacy hole along the fence so the guy suggested moving some of our tall ornamental grass over there.

At the side of the house we have two very small ash trees that look out of place so we're having those taken down as well. Hopefully bringing them down will help the emerald cedars planted there live longer as right now they're dying one by one because they don't get enough sunlight. There's a very small weeping mulberry that's planted there, too, but we can take that out or move it ourselves. After looking at how beautiful the tree can be when it's pruned properly, I might want it put somewhere else on the property where it makes more sense and can be gorgeous.

In our backyard we have larger three ash trees. We're going to leave them up for the time being even though the emerald ash borer is in our region and will find and infest our trees. At that point, these trees will have to come down but we're losing so many others that we don't want to have to take down any more trees than are absolutely necessary right now.

In addition to deciding which trees have to come down, we also learned more about the other trees in our yard. The tulip tree doesn't thrive in windy places; it prefers to be in a lower, more sheltered, spot. Having it up at the edge of the property where the wind blows means that it will never really thrive.

We learned that the two trees that didn't produce fruit this year are cherry trees, and that we have an small ornamental crabapple tree tucked away behind the greenhouse. It'll be more noticeable when the birch trees are gone although I don't know how much sun it's going to get. We also have a Rose of Sharon that might get more light when the birch trees are gone.

It's sad because we bought this house in part because of the beautiful garden and trees. We knew that the trees were too close together and that we might lose a few to make room but we had no idea that we'd lose so many other trees. Our backyard is going to look very, very different when everything is done.