Last Tuesday was bittersweet. I finished writing a novel I’ve been working on rather strenuously for the last two years. That should have been cause for celebration and it was. But I instantly missed my characters, the novel’s locale – a grand hotel overlooking the Adriatic Sea in Venice that I’ve returned to daily over the previous months, at least in my imagination – and most of all the daily joy of tinkering with words.
But that loss was compounded by a second, more visual and visceral one. We cut down three towering but diseased spruce trees in our front yard.
I’m of the belief that you should only cut down trees when they fall down. But the trees had become an unavoidable eyesore that grew worse with each passing season.
When I took one of the branches to the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Columbia and Greene Counties a year ago I was informed the trees were the victim of a fungus called needlecast. It attacks blue spruce, the needles closest to the trunk falling off while the outer foliage remains green.
However, left untreated – and it was virtually impossible, not to mention prohibitively expensive, to treat a sixty-foot tree – the entire spruce will die over time.
By the time we cut them down three-quarters of the tree was bare with only the tops remaining green and reasonably lush.
The conifers came with a story. I’d been told my grandmother had planted them for my three brothers and me when we were born. One of the trees had died previously as had, sadly, one of my brothers.
I have an old black and white photo of my grandmother planting them. Or at least standing beside them in the snow when they were shorter than she was. Over the years they grew to a great height, their demise accelerating within the last few seasons.
Apart from their sentimental connection, I couldn’t remember the house, or the vista without their presence. And I was concerned the place would look barren especially in winter when they provide the only blush of green on the landscape.
But we hired Charlie Nagle, a local tree guy who boasted that when he cut the trees down he could guarantee they fell pretty much exactly where he intended. (I was concerned about then taking several streetlights along our road.)
As it turned out, the operation was both more and less dramatic than I assumed it would be. There wasn’t any cry of “Timber!” and a mighty tree crashing to the forest floor.
Rather Charlie shimmied to the top of each one, chainsawing branches as he went, until the tree resembled a totem pole awaiting carving. Then he shimmed back down, sawing off the trunk into manageable chunks that he trucked off the property, a wood chipper grinding the fallen branches into mulch.
Charlie also shredded the stumps. So that by the time he was done several days later there was scant evidence the trees ever existed.
Now the question becomes what do we do next? Plant three new evergreens, but a more disease-resistant variety? Plant a different type of tree, such as a maple, an oak, or even something new and arresting, such as a copper beech. Or leave the area free of trees.
It’s not as if we lack for shade. Our house is surrounded by hundred-year-old maples, the forest approaching our front door.
And I’m enjoying the vista, such as it is. It’s opened the lawn all the way to our stream and a maple that also doesn’t look long for this world. Then again it doesn’t appear substantially different or heartier in photographs of it taken in the 1940’s. So it may well outlive me.
But we probably still need to think ahead to when it and a couple of other ancient trees overlooking the house need to come down.
Who was it that said that planting trees is an act of faith? In the future. Especially these days when everything from politics to climate change seems to conspire against nature.
But in the same way that the trees my grandmother planted was an act of faith and celebration, not to do the same would be to shirk our responsibility. To our children. To the property. And most of all to the future. A future that requires each of us to recognize that we are less owners of the land than its stewards, preserving and protecting it for generations yet to come.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgardner.com
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