Probably no thinking person can cut down a big tree without pause. Big trees are big, and size alone earns some respect. Longevity has a lot to do with it too. The only time I took down a really old tree, a 175-year-old red maple, I felt just terrible. The enormous trunk was half rotted and riddled with carpenter ants and going to come down soon anyway, likely taking most of our house and a neighbor’s barn with it. There was good reason to remove that tree. Still, you’re killing something Big, and, like slaughtering a pig, it isn’t a process to undertake casually. But, you live in the country awhile, you toughen up. If you want hormone-free, home-smoked bacon, you dispatch the pig. If you want a garden, trees have to go. Just because something is big doesn’t mean it can’t be a weed. Now I can fell poplars and and sizeable saplings as though I were ripping out so much quackgrass. But real trees, trees somebody planted, trees that have occupied and dominated their spaces for decades, are big, old, alive, and still hard to execute. My friend Susan (Pea Queen of Ulster County and Contender for the Carrot Crown) geared up, after years of agonizing, to take down two 40-year-old black walnuts that were poisoning the soil and making it impossible for her to grow the flowers and vegetables she wanted. When the trees came down, her outlook seemed to brighten as much as her garden did. I always thought I was a tad a bolder than Susan (While her’s is a much more nurturing personality. And we’re just talking gardening here, not larger issues.), but it took her example to nudge me into removing a scuzzy blue spruce that was casting increasing shade over our main flower bed. The spruce went two months ago and I haven’t missed it one bit. We’ve installed a spiffy new cedar trellis to screen the view that the spruce had obscured. I had no place for climbing roses or clematis and now I do. So the pile of rose and clematis books grows by the porch rocker and I fantasize about future possibilities and try to ignore the undone jobs and blighted hopes in this year’s garden. Throughout the above dissertation I used the first-person, “I took down”, and “I removed”, as though I’d wielded the chain saw myself. Not so. I picked up the phone and gave the word to my liscensed, accredited, professional arborist. After it was all over I signed the checks, feeling that every penny was well-spent. I haven’t climbed a tree in years, I’ve no wish to cut off my foot, and I’ve absolute faith in my tree man’s skills. I also trust his advice. When you’re killing a tree, it’s nice to have a partner in crime, someone to agree that the blue spruce is indeed scuzzy and a plant in the wrong place. And someone who’ll tell you that your venerable sugar maple looks just fine, but let’s fertilize it this year to help compensate for last year’s drought. If your hopes for your garden this year have been somewhat blighted, you’re not alone. The wet weather has caused various blights, mostly fungal. From the working gardener’s point of view, it doesn’t much matter whether it’s fusarium, verticillium, or petunia wilt. Plants are succumbing and there’s not much we can do about it. In my garden, everything that’s actually died of these mysterious maladies has been annual squashes, old-fashioned tomato varieties, datura, and petunias. This year shows the importance of those cryptic strings of letters attached to various seeds to indicate a variety better able to withstand these diseases. Better luck next year. But there are a lot of various rusts, mildews, and things turning to mush (I don’t know what the correct technical name for that is) to give me plenty to wonder about. Pity the fruit growers, battling to keep the apples decent. The Old Farmer’s Almanac has predicted drought for early fall. Almost sounds good.

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