Life of a tree

My grandparents planted this red maple when they built their house, circa 1986. I remember it being taller than me - maybe 7-8' tall. It's been my 'hummingbird tree' - I hang my feeder from it, and they like to take shelter in it while they compete for it. It's been a really nice shade tree for the house too.

This pic was from spring 1991, when my grandfather finished building my grandmother's flower garden - it's the small tree behind him. If you look closely you can see a couple of the pine and spruce they planted around the house as well.



This is a pic from earlier this summer - I was taking pics of the firewood but you can see the tree and garden in the background.



It's been repeatedly pruned on the driveway side and it has a pronounced lean towards the house. This year I've been finding ants in the hummingbird feeder, and that really started to worry me about the health of the tree. So, it was time to say goodbye. My friend Charlie, who sponsors our volleyball team, has a tree biz, and today he took it down for me.



It took less than an hour to piece it down, with me and his wife working as the ground crew, and afterwards he wouldn't take any payment from me. They handed me a thank you card from their wedding a couple weeks ago and a couple bags of fresh veggies from their garden.

I didn't get any pics of the takedown because there were a lot of limbs to drag away and it all happened so fast. He had a pretty clever technique for roping the pieces down that were over the house. He limbed the leader that was furthest from the house, put a rope in it over a high crotch point, and used that as a spar to get the branches to swing away from the house after he cut them. Not even twig ever touched the house.



I didn't end up doing much with it today - it was too hot and I was too hungover from my best friend's wedding last night. I'll be working on it tomorrow cause it's all over my back yard right now.

 

Looks like the perfect candidate for some type of memento. Make somethin' outta that sucker and present them(grandparents) with a gift that can stay in the family forever!

 

Great stuff!! I often wonder about the life of trees that I process for firewood. Now that I get tree service drop offs I sometimes find indicators of their past; metal bits, wire, old pruning marks all tell me that they lived their lives in the proximity of people. It's cool that you know the exact life of that one and have the pics to prove it.

I think---Who planted it? Counting the rings... 70+....tells me that the person that planted it has probably passed on... Who sat under it for shade? How many kids climbed it? Did lightning hit it? What storms did this tree weather? It's easy to wax poetic when you have a 28" bar buried in a cut haha.

 

Cleaned up the yard today and prepared the tree for it's return to ashes and dust. I probably hauled a dozen trailer loads of brush.



I stashed all the brush next to a low spot off of my main trail - the pile is probably 16' long x 8' tall. If I get my hands on a decent chipper, Plan A will be to chip it all right into the low spot. Plan B will be to let it dry and have a brush fire next year to finish burning out the large maple stump near the mouth of my main trail.



Got most of the firewood sawn up too. It won't be nearly enough to fill my new pallet, but I can scrounge up plenty more to finish it off. I had a large maple slab that's been sitting out in the woods all summer and it got somewhat twisted, so I took that for firewood today too on my last trip into the woods.

 

Good Work! Just a bit of info to help you. If you don't want that tree stump to sprout, you had better herbicide that stump or it is going to sprout back. It you intend to let it sprout to grow another, cut it lower to the ground so the sprout you end up to let grow choosing doesn't rot out as it matures. God Bless