The Upside of Downed Trees

There is nothing quite so jarring as walking out of your home at the first light of morning to find a 50-foot-long debris field of trees in your driveway. But, that’s exactly what I found three days ago when I went out to fetch the newspapers in my driveway.

The pine was basically hollow

 A cold front had come through overnight with forecasted strong winds out of the northeast. Sometime during the night, one of those gusts became the last gasp for a towering, but badly aging 50-foot-tall white pine on my neighbor’s property. The tree snapped off about 15 feet off the ground, revealing a huge, empty chamber that once had been the tree’s heartwood and pith; surrounded by a few inches thickness of still-living outer bark, inner bark, and sapwood.

The ornamental plum, 
stripped of all branches

As it fell, though, the tree smashed through two deciduous trees. One was a Norway maple (no loss), the other a beautiful, 40-foot-tall ornamental plum that had a dazzling spring bloom and lovely fall foliage. The pine’s weight and still-growing upper breadth effectively cleaved the two trees of all of their branches, leaving only tall trunks.

 Everything else was on my driveway.

The debris field stretched 50 feet

I may or may not still own a chainsaw. If I do, I have no idea where it is and I don’t keep the gas/oil mixture it requires to run. But I do have two exceedingly sharp corona saws, and so I went to work clearing enough of a pathway so I could get my car out of the garage. That took an hour. Just as I was finishing, my neighbor came over; astonished at what had happened, profuse in apology for not seeing the carnage, and saying he would get all the debris off my property using his pickup and chains.

The ornamental plum in its heyday

He did a very thorough job; even clearing the brush from what had been a twenty-foot-wide no-mans-land between our two properties. I would have pitched in but was otherwise obliged to help make ‘dump runs’ between the Community Garden and town transfer station as part of the season-end clean-up of the garden.

When I got back, I was astonished at the transformation: for the first time in a decade, the sun was shining on our perennial border.

As you can see from the shadows,
the perennial border was in shade

When Betty laid out the garden that we would have in lieu of grass, she knew there was only a narrow strip of soil between the edge of our driveway and the property line we share with our neighbor. But, it was 70 feet long and deserved to be filled with visually arresting shrubs and perennials. Our neighbor’s trees were eleven years younger and so what she chose and we planted was a mix of tall-ish flowering perennials that required six to eight hours a day of sunlight. We also built two, four-foot-by-eight-foot raised beds in which we planned to grow strawberries and leaf vegetables.

With the trees gone, there's now
hope for our raised beds.

Nature, however, took its course. To create our garden, we took down roughly 40 pines on our property (all, I might add, of a similar vintage to the one that crashed over). We filled the space with young trees and shrubs. The trees in our neighbor’s no-man’s-land promptly reached out for the now-ample sunshine to their south. Within three years, our raised beds no longer got enough sun even for a crop of lettuce. The sun-seeking perennials that did not die out began reaching out into the driveway for light. Much of the border was re-planted with shade-tolerant perennials.

 I’m now faced with a wonderful opportunity of re-planting the border with brighter, more sun-loving perennials. Yes, it will be a lot of work. So what?

 Who knew there was such an upside to having three downed trees?