August 26, 2016
Dear Everyone:
We’ve been
culling trees around here.
The community where I am currently living was originally built in the
late 1980s as an apartment complex.
The developer, no doubt, paid a landscaping company to plant sod,
hedges, bushes and various trees to make the area attractive.
Then the landscaper moved on to another job, the developer sold
the complex, and the trees and plants just kept growing, more or less.
There are some large evergreen trees that probably top out at over 60
feet high. Lots of shady
trees are now taller than the two-story buildings they surround.
And, over time, different landscaping companies have been
contracted to take care of the trees and other plants.
The thing about trees is, with the notable exception of some
Giant
Sequoias, most trees aren’t meant to last for centuries.
Not even for decades, really.
And some of the trees around here have been in place, literally,
for decades. Most of them
needed some trimming. And
some of them just needed to go to the Big Forest in the Sky.
Especially the ones whose root systems have been compromising the
plumbing.
All this past week a special crew of workers, separate from the usual
landscapers, have been swarming through the complex, like a horde of
locusts, trimming branches and dispatching whole trees when it was
deemed necessary. And what
happened to all those trimmings?
Chipper, that’s what.
Leaves, twigs, small branches, bigger branches, and even whole logs went
through the chipper, very loudly, and came out as banks of wood chips.
Which the workers spread around, giving the whole place a nice
uniform appearance. Until
the next big wind storm, of course.
Naturally, everyone has an opinion about all this.
The chipper is too noisy! I
liked that tree! The wind
blew wood chips onto my patio!
Hey, as long as you’re doing all this, can you take away the tree
outside my window? I don’t
like it.
This last one was directed at one of the workers who took a look at the
offending vegetation and declared it to be an
avocado tree.
The homeowner sent an email to the
Property Manager, asking if
the avocado could be taken out.
The Property Manager, naturally, passed the request on to the
Homeowner Association (HOA) Board, of which I am a member.
Normally, I would be hesitant about letting a homeowner dictate
landscaping choices. It sets
a bad precedent. But I
toddled on over to the unit in question and, sure enough, there was an
avocado tree growing right next to the stairway.
I was pretty sure the landscaper hadn’t made that choice.
There are no other avocado trees anywhere in the area.
And they wouldn’t have planted something that close to the
stairway. Or, more
accurately, the fire department wouldn’t have let them.
Instead, it looks like someone actually planted the thing on their own.
(“Look! I planted an
avocado pit! Let’s see if it
grows!”) And it had been
there for a while, since the top branches reached the window on the
second floor.
A flurry of emails back and forth between the Board members determined
that the tree could be removed, provided it didn’t add to the overall
cost of the project.
Otherwise we would refer it to the usual landscaper for further review.
The head of the tree-trimming crew graciously agreed to remove
the avocado for no extra charge.
As of today, the chipper is gone and it’s blissfully quiet once again.
My patio suddenly has much more sunlight and I can even see more
of the complex outside the fence.
Of course, not everyone is thrilled with it all.
The resident squirrels are a bit put out at having significant
portions of their usual aerial thoroughfare suddenly disappear.
It would be rather like barreling home on the freeway only to
suddenly find that your off-ramp just isn’t there anymore.
Yikes!
Love, as always,
Pete
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