Pine Gone!

Where the big gap in the border is, once stood my 15' Austrian black pine.

It's Saturday, a day when many tackle the to-do list that has been building for a week or more.  This morning, it looks like we might get some fierce pop-up thunderstorms.  We could use the rain.  I think the last time it really rained here was the beginning of August.  I know, because it was torrential when my village board meeting was done and I had opted to walk to it instead of drive.

Noah (NOAA.gov) says otherwise.  "Noah" says this or Noah said that.  Friends and family kindly reminds me another Noah built an ark.  I am watering.  Later, Faithful Companion will supervise as I mow the lawn that doubles as my garden paths.  It is lush and green.  While I don't water the lawn per se, it gets a lot of moisture and is sheltered from the sun by my borders.  My lawn is lush and green, and has too much clover in it for my liking, but green.  It is nice to sit on, unlike the lawns once I leave my street.  The lawns here benefit from having gardeners in attendance and even the busiest drag out the hose and turn on the sprinklers.

Two years in a row of drought, although this year is misleading with our milder temperatures.  Last year it was hard to keep up with the endless watering and many private wells were tested, and failed.

For the past year, I have been tackling a much broader scope of gardening to-dos.  My garden has plateaued and as every gardener knows, gardens are about change.  Whether it is the bloom cycle or the growth of shrubs and trees, changing shade and sun patterns as the seasons change, change in a garden is a constant.  Big, sudden changes are sometime difficult for us to envision.   If you had proposed to me a year ago I would have decided to remove my small pine in my back yard, I would have given you a perplexed look.

I have always admired the Austrian black pines in expansive landscapes of stately homes in expensive neighborhoods in Illinois.  I admired their form, lushness, and how they are pines "all the way to the ground".  This last may seem an odd comment, until you realize I was surrounded with "self-trimming" Jack (red pines) and white pines most of my life.  These pines constantly lose their branches one after another from the ground up, growing 40' or 50' in as many years and retaining branches on only the top 20' or 30'.

This year, my neighbors sided the garage with this nice vinyl in an appealing shade.  Suddenly, screening the view wasn't super-important.  With siding, I could consider the fence extending all the way to the garage, not needing to consider access for painting.  My mind just keep moving from there.  That Bloodgood seedling with the interesting leaves, now nearly four feet tall could have its own space, not just tucked in a holding space pretending to be a colorful perennial, as it matured enough to fight it out on its own...and how nice would its foliage look against that sage-y green!

So, on Thursday, my brother, the Gardening Twins, and Baby Boo came to cut down the pine, pick apples and make pizza.  My brother chided me on not moving it to his place five years ago, where sap suckers could have at while it held down visual real estate in a much larger frame dividing his historical property from train and interstate.  "Can't we still figure out how to move it?"  I gave him that look; it's 15' tall!  (I'd already dealt with my angst and its issues many times.)

We had a moment to consider in silence, and then cut it down piece by piece in sections, gave it due homage, counting its rings, admiring its lushness at the top branches, and carefully piled its branches in a huge convex stack.

Other changes in my garden this week!

Honeycrisp apples are ripe!  My tree has been loaded this year.  I should have thinned the apples, but I have been doing extra watering to cover my lapse in judgment!

Sweet Autumn clematis began to bloom this week!

I hadn't really noticed it before, but at least this calibrachoa appears to close at night.

This is the fourth year for this plant orange-flowering Hardy Hummingbird Trumpet, Zauschneria californica ssp. latifolia (There are a couple different common and Latin names for this!) in my garden.  It must be well-placed as it is typically given a zone 6 or 7 rating.  Monrovia considers it hardy to zone 8!  Mine does go dormant and is slow to get going, but is not unsightly while thinking about it.  It looks great planted in this scree area with the fescue 'Elijah Blue'.

Japanese False Cypress or Boulevard Cypress is looking particularly good this year.

After believing this smokebush 'Nordine' dead early this June and cutting the thing to the ground shortly thereafter, it has regrown to the height it had attained last year.  This years color has been remarkable and intense, but the trade-off was no "smoke".

Just a note, these last three plants are all a bit out of their zone, growing in my garden.

It's 4:45 PM and the Noon Whistle Just Blew!

Considering a possible pollinator plant for 'Honeycrisp' is crabapple, I guess this pattern of fruiting is not unusual in this apple.  I thought the winds would have taken them.

Okay, I live in such a small town we still have a noon whistle, and it is still being blown at noon.  Quaint, I know.  There are still people who work here in town until they hear it and then go home for lunch.  If the wind is from the right direction, I can actually hear it out at the farm five miles from town.

Today, however, it tells me precisely how long the power was out.  Sometime between midnight and 3 AM, the wind began to howl.  Handsome Son is somewhere near the Canadian border fishing.  For those brief moments of consciousness, I debated getting up and moving to his futon on the lower level and farther from the possible fall zone of the top of my white pine...or the branch broken off but totally lodged (for a while, at least) about 50 feet up.  (I know it's broken off and dead; I get glimpses of its brown-ness from time to time on the summer breeze.)

I debated, for those few brief moments, had passing thoughts about the merits of Code Red (our county's emergency notification call service), and then...fell fast asleep...until sometime around 5 AM when I realized my fan was not doing its shimmy shake, and the only light was from "the light from yonder window break".  Luckily, not actually broken, but my head felt that way, two aspirin were in order.

Two aspirin and juice and a call to the power company to let them know and surprise-- someone had already called--itself unusual.  Then, back to bed.

Horrific dreams waiting for me. 

In the first, my boxer, Cinnamon, Had been attacked by a huge fly, probably the one that carries elephantiasis.  It had laid its larva in her sleek hide and now they were hatching and she was up the stairs to the loft to jump onto my bed and to anxiously display her swirling swarm of airborne abusers.  It seemed real.

The second short dream seemed equally true.  Handsome Son was home from his fishing trip because he missed me and need to impart some urgent message, "Wake up, Mom..."

Shortly before 8 AM, the quiet of the village, the geese, and cranes, were interrupted by the persistent growl of more and more gas generators powering up, and the sound of sawing.  There was lots of sawing.

'Arthur Kroll'-- does this bud pattern look familiar? This is one flowering stalk!

'Frizzled Lace' gladiola, purchased from Brent and Becky's Bulbs.  The flower doesn't even look like a gladiola!

 My house and garden had no damage.  I could take these pretty pictures.  A clump of 5 oak leaves was laying on my lawn.  I stared at it like a foreign thing trying to come up with the closest oak to my property and drawing an absolute blank-- Oak Street?

A half block to the north, nearly every tree was broken off or uprooted, the tops of roofs, deer stands, unanchored sheds were shoved down road ways and flipped like a toys,  Sheet metal was wrapped around stop signs, glass windows on the east sides shattered by debris.  The official word is no tornado, just straight line wind sheer.  No one was injured.  Power has been restored, in almost record time. 

Almost all is well, with the exception of yet another major blow to the number of trees in our village.  The sawing and chipping will continue for some days.  There will be insurance paperwork for some.  Others, repairs if they can afford to make them.

My white pine and I feel very lucky.