Tree Exchange

One of my favorite bloom­ing-any­thing is an orna­men­tal cher­ry tree. I can real­ly say why, since it’s not like there were any in the yard where I grew up. There’s just some­thing about them that I find beau­ti­ful and relax­ing. I find it hard to see one with hav­ing also the urge to pho­to­graph it. It’s ethe­re­al the way they drop their petals like pink snow.

We had a very beau­ti­ful orna­men­tal cher­ry tree in our back­yard up until recent­ly. The trunk mea­sured sev­en to eight inch­es in diam­e­ter, which if you’ve ever been to the gar­den cen­ter pur­chase one, you’ll real­ize is very large for an orna­men­tal tree. It’s branch­es were the size of most trees at the green­house and they spread out hor­i­zon­tal­ly to pro­vide a large shad­ed area in our back­yard. It pro­vid­ed a won­der­ful pink bou­quet each spring and then gave way to a bushy green canopy. At first, it’s spread was so wide, I found it a pain to mow around. I came to appre­ci­ate it for just how won­der­ful it was, though.

Sad­ly, trees don’t live for­ev­er, any­more than ani­mals do. I knew that the tree was dead, but just did­n’t have the heart dur­ing the past cou­ple of months to do any­thing about it. Final­ly, after talk­ing with some friends along with knowl­edge­able green­house employ­ees, we deter­mined that the tree had sim­ply died of old age. We real­ly don’t know how old the tree was, but it’s safe to say it was old­er than either of us giv­en it’s size. Who knows? It may have very well been old­er than my par­ents, even (the house, after all, is 68 years old).

We decid­ed that this past week­end would be a good time to do some gar­den­ing and that part of my job would be to tear out the old tree. It was actu­al­ly kind of sad doing so. Not like los­ing a pet that you have long enough to know it’s per­son­al­i­ty. More like a pet that just brings you joy hav­ing around, even if it’s noth­ing you can active­ly do any­thing with.

Odd­ly enough, nei­ther Angela nor I even sug­gest­ed replac­ing it with anoth­er cher­ry tree. We have one in our front yard we plant­ed a cou­ple of years ago and that is doing quit well there. Instead, we select­ed a pink dog­wood that looks like has lots of poten­tial to spread out over our back­yard just as the old cher­ry tree did. Maybe, in 30 or so years, some­one else will be here and get to appre­ci­ate it in the same way we enjoyed our old cher­ry tree.