Decades of tree history

We have a number of large mature trees on our house lot and the adjacent parkings, and I can remember when many of them were planted, since Dad and Mom bought the house in 1944, when I was 3 years old.

Several other mature trees on the property were removed for one reason or another over the years, and I can recall several of those incidences as well. I imagine other old-timers in town harbor similar memories of nearby trees from their childhood and bygone years.

We live on a corner lot, on a quarter-block of property. The large hard maple on the south parking was planted by Dad, my brother Bill and myself in 1948 or so. It’s a beautiful tree, with branches that spread outward and upward, and its fall colors are magnificent.

The other large hard maple, the one on the south end of the west parking, is even older. It predated the folks’ 1944 house purchase. And its condition? Not so great. I doubt it has many years of shade left. Back in the day Dad hung a tire swing from one of its high horizontal branches, and all of us kids in the neighborhood spent happy summer days swinging on it.

A very tall tree, it has been struck by lightning many times, and only a few of its main branches are still attached. We’ve had several dead branches taken out, and what remains is not an attractive sight.

At least not for us.

But for dozens of turkey vultures that many nights soar in to roost on its tall dead portions, it must be the Taj Mahal. They gather at dusk, flapping their great black wings as they alight on the bare branches, and they’re there in the morning, some of them spreading their feathers wide to dry out in the sunshine.

Along about mid-morning some of them then flap over to our chimneys and roofline, where they sit for awhile before taking off to look for carrion somewhere. It’s a little unnerving to look up at our house and see a line of vultures hunched over, sort of like Snoopy when he pretends to be a vulture in the cartoon “Peanuts”.  

We don’t think they know something we don’t, but it’s thought-provoking anyhow.

There’s one other maple, a beautiful smaller one next to our driveway on the west parking. It’s flanked by two ash trees, also very attractive and shady. We plan to have them inoculated to protect against the ash borer.

The other tree on our parkings is a tall linden next to the maple on the south parking. Kathy and I planted that one about 25 years ago, and it soon became our “roadrunner tree”, because shortly after it was planted it developed two parallel thin trunks that each bent outward, giving it the appearance of the Roadrunner character in the Looney Tunes cartoons.

But in the years since then, it shed one of the trunks and now has almost a perfect Christmas-tree shape as it fills the space between the two very large maples.

Our actual lot, inside the sidewalks, contains five other large trees. In the front yard is a little leaf linden that fills the entire space adjacent to our wrap-around porch on the west side of the house. It provides some privacy for us and our guests during porch-time. It’s probably too large for the yard space it occupies, but at this point we’re not about to cut it back. When one of our friends, acting in good faith, took a chain saw to the lowest large branch on its north side, Kathy almost did the same to him.

At the east end of our south yard is a large moraine locust, planted by my mom largely because of its name. It is thornless, fortunately, but like one of the maples it too has a number of dead branches, and it sheds twigs unpleasantly.

Next to the southeast corner of the house, adjacent to our dining room and just east of the screened-in porch, is a beautiful magnolia tree, also planted by Mom. In early spring it blooms magnificently with large white flower-like leaves.

Sometimes, if the winds let it stay in bloom for several weeks, couples heading for prom will come by to have their photos taken in front of it. And for several years it served as a stopping-off spot for hundreds of migrating monarch butterflies in the fall, which would roost on the underside of its leaves. I leave the ground beneath it pretty much untouched, providing cover for a large number of songbirds, and several of its branches hold some of my bird feeders.

There’s a flowering crab in the north yard, near the garage, and in the middle of the property line north of the house is a large volunteer walnut.

Several years ago we had to take down the big box elder in the back yard, as well as an overgrown white pine in the north yard and a sizable cedar tree on the property line just east of the walnut. And while I was still a kid, Dad had two soft maples and an elm on the parkings removed because they were dead or dying.

But we’re very pleased with the trees we now have, and we expect to enjoy them all before we’re through with them, or until they’re through with us.
 

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Jefferson Bee & Herald
Address: 200 N. Wilson St.
Jefferson, IA 50129

Phone:(515) 386-4161