Posts Tagged ‘dying tree’
Unexplained Death
I am loath to admit what is daily becoming more apparent. The maple tree that I have been gushing about for the last seven years, transplanted from our woods as a sapling in the fall of 2016, is not showing any sign of life this spring.
We keep hoping beyond hope that the stunted little buds on the branches are just delayed, but the little branch I snapped off a few days ago didn’t offer much hope, with little in the way of green life showing.
My inner pessimist has me thinking my cocky decision to begin annually measuring the circumference of the trunk to track its growth brought on this outcome. What I don’t understand, among the many things I don’t understand, is how and why this is occurring so suddenly. I have watched a lot of trees die in my lifetime, and they usually show plenty of signs they are on the way out.
This is how that maple tree looked ten months ago:
The dang willow tree in the small paddock that I cut almost to a stump and has no reason to have any real future health has sprouted a surprising amount of new branches. If this maple is failing, couldn’t it at the very least pop out a few little attempts to get some nourishment from the sun?
In the spring of 2017, we draped a sheet over the delicate new transplant to protect it from freezing temperatures.
I am so very sad and disappointed. More importantly, I am at a loss as to what happened and what we might have been able to do differently to prevent this sudden failure. When we can muster the mental fortitude to take invasive steps to inspect the roots, we would hope to learn if there is rot. Did it get too much water? Did the lack of snow and hard, hard freezes last winter have this impact?
There are no signs of insect activity or any other visible fungus. All I have is the perception of full leaves last summer, a normal fall change of color and dropping of leaves, and tiny buds that stunted and stopped this spring. It feels like going from all to none.
It sucks. I’m heartsick over it. At this point, I’m not sure I even want to bother trying a fifth time for a tree in the center of the labyrinth garden.
Maybe it’s just dormant and will make a second attempt at leafing out. I could try cutting off the limbs like I did the willow tree and see if that makes it sprout new growth.
Instead, I plan to do nothing. It is what it is. I plan to sink my oodles of tree love into all the other wonderful volunteers around our property that we didn’t need to transplant, but now are being nurtured by protectively clearing around them and frequently monitoring their well-being.
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More Trimming
Before the ground in the small paddock turns into a swampy mess with this February thaw, I took advantage of the warm afternoon to use the pole chainsaw on the mostly dead willow tree to get another level of limbs removed.
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By the time I finished, we were picking up branches from pools of standing water at the base of the tree.
I had considered removing all of the large stump at the center of the tree, but Cyndie talked me into leaving it for the time being with a comment wondering how that might affect the center of balance of what remained.
Most noteworthy for the afternoon was the fact that the chainsaw started easily after just a couple of pulls, and none of the branches I cut fell on my head.
It went so well that I immediately made my way to a maple tree beside the hay shed that had several dead limbs I’d been wanting to cut out for some time. It won’t surprise me if those are an indication the rest of the tree may not be far behind. We’ll be watching to see what the coming growing season reveals.
Last night, we watched the Screen Actors Guild Awards Show on Netflix. Jane Fonda was given a Life Achievement Award and gave an impassioned acceptance speech that media responses labeled “fiery” and “politically charged.” Would we expect anything less from Jane Fonda?
She tossed in, “Woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
It was mentioned that, in addition to many awards she has won for her accomplishments, she made it onto Nixon’s enemies list for her anti-war activism. I won’t be surprised if she just made it onto the current administration’s enemies list, as well.
I wonder if you can volunteer to be added to such a list. That’s an honor I’ll gladly accept if it ever comes my way.
Maybe I should join SAG-AFTRA.
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Slow Death
In my lifetime, I’ve watched a lot of trees die a slow death. The willow in our small paddock was a beautiful tree when we moved here. When we fenced it in, we knew the risk we were taking and tried to protect the bark with a variety of barriers to prevent horses from chewing on it. That battle was not going to stave off the inevitable because the combination of heavy hoof traffic and standing urine puddles in that very wet soil was killing it from the ground up.
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When it became obvious the tree was dying, we removed the protection from the trunk and let the horses have at it. For two growing seasons, I have been shocked by how much green growth was still sprouting amid the tangle of dead branches. Today, the lean is obvious, and I’m not sure the tree will be standing long enough to find out if any new leaves will show up at all this year.
The horses have seemed to enjoy chewing away at the base of their favorite shade spot.
At this point, it hardly offers much shade at all, but they still frequently hang out beneath it, maybe out of habit.
Soon I will have to cut it up and haul the debris away and the horses will have nothing to stand under except for the overhang of the barn. This has me dreaming again of a sail shade for them. I think that would be pretty slick.
I also think it would be pretty expensive to pull off. I have my doubts about such a feature working in our climate year-round and wonder how long a life expectancy a sail would have under relentless UV rays, occasional high winds, and periods of heavy snow. However, in the simple terms of shade on a sunny day, I think it would be a really neat solution.
Maybe we should do a feasibility study on the idea. If it ends up not being a sensible way to provide shade for the horses, there are other possibilities we could consider. Coming up with something that will take the abuse that horses can dish out tends to complicate the search, but by looking for ways other horse folks have solved the issue, I’m sure we could find a reasonably affordable method that beats a dying willow tree.
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Eaten Tree
There was a time when the willow tree was happy and healthy inside the space that we fenced off for our small paddock. Knowing full well the threat livestock pose to trees within their confines, we tried several versions of barriers intended to keep the horses from chewing the bark. It was fine with us that they munched the hanging branches. It gave the tree a look of being well-trimmed at all times.
After the first few attempts to protect the tree trunk proved insufficient –read: the horses just chewed up whatever we tried using– I chose to wrap the tree with hardware cloth. In time, even that protection broke down under the constant rubbing and biting from the horses, but it no longer appeared to matter by then. The tree was beginning to fail from the compression of the soil around the roots and we suspect, the heavy dose of horse urine that stagnated there as well.
Even when provided two years free of horses in that paddock, the gorgeous willow tree continued to show evidence of an ongoing downward spiral. Based on that, when we found out that new horses would be coming to live with us, we decided we would no longer do anything toward protecting the trunk of the tree.
This is what unobstructed access to the trunk of the tree looks like after two years:
I’m a little surprised by how interested the horses are in the roots. They’ve almost chewed more roots than bark at this point. At the very top of the image, you can see the horses also like to reach up to chew well above their shoulder height. Since we’ve given up on the tree, I see the chewing of tree bark as taking away some of the pressure on the boards and fencing around the overhang.
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Relative Something 