Just be glad that I didn't write the blog I was starting yesterday! A hint: the title was "A Bad Mood". Enough of that! Today was great and my mood matched it because Bob and I bought a tree! That's it, wrapped up looking like some giant dildo and eliciting stares as we drove home.
I have been researching and shopping for a clump of birches, partly because I have always admired them and partly because we have all this empty space cheerfully provided by that tornado that visited. We needed shade and a feature to partially block our neighbor's house and a focal point. I wanted something jazzy that had several seasons of interest. I really like the very white birches but have been warned that they succumb to all kinds of borers and leaf miners and they're brittle and they break. So I turned up several cultivars of Betula nigra (River birch, more familiarly) with the varieties "Duraheat" (lousy name!) and "Cully's Heritage" being recommended as particularly attractive with extra exfoliating bark- bronzey golden brown that peels to reveal salmon pink and creamy under bark, with foliage that turns vivid yellow in the fall. After many trips and phone calls to nurseries, I found what I was looking for...
It was a lovely day, we took a pleasant drive to one of our favorite nurseries and... they didn't have the size we were looking for, despite it being mentioned on a "specimens list" that had been emailed only the week before. All that was available were gigantic and twice what we were looking at spending. Alas! But another employee at the nursery checked and located one that was about to be "upgraded" and graduated to more expensive status as it had grown so lustily this year. She sold it to us for the lower price (literally like 1/2 the price!) Hooray!!!
They wrapped this cluster up and helped to load it and suddenly it appeared like twice as big as it had. I was shopping for a (hahahaha) five or six foot individual and we got us a ten foot tree at a bargain price and I started thinking, "And now we have to get this sucker home and plant it". I'm certain Bob was having similar thoughts. It just looked bigger and bigger and bigger.
As you can see in the above pictures, it rode home quite happily and we got it off the truck intact- or I should say, BOB got it off the truck with ropes and gently inching it towards the planks he posted at the rear of the truck and slid it down. I dutifully held ropes and pulled on my side but nothing budged; I tried.
But I sent Bob into the house after he wrestled the tree onto the ground. He needed a rest and I could handle the next phase: digging the biggest hole I've ever dug. I have graduated from annuals to perennials to shrubs and bushes and small saplings to trees! (But I assured Bob: this IS the biggest tree we will ever plant.)
And here's my lovely assistant Robin, ideally suited to helping me dig. She did a marvelous job of loosening the soil so that I could shovel it onto the pile.
The pile got even bigger than that! Bob is going to finish the hole tomorrow and then we're going to plant. I'll post additional pictures of that Herculean task. But in the meantime, take a look at the detail of this bark. This particular clump is nice, too, as it has four trunks and will create a really remarkable presence in the vast empty wilderness left by the tornadoes destruction. Why, it will probably look like it was always here. Let's see if our friends notice it the next time they visit!
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