This seems like a good year to celebrate the trees around our very old house near the ocean.
Over the years we've planted, transplanted, or encouraged maybe twenty native trees in our backyard. Many of them volunteered in our yard, starting from blown-in local seed, and we just moved them to a place convenient to us. Three Coast redwoods from the local hardware store now thrive happily, stretching thirty feet toward the sky. Several Monterey cypress challenge them. Smaller ones, down to newly-transplanted volunteers poking but a few inches above the soil, reach upward toward them. For us they are making a living privacy screen serving both us and our neighbors on the other side. One tall cypress was thrown down by the near-hurricane winds we suffered last Winter, and we replaced it with two little redwoods from the hardware store.
This spring we discovered a tiny hummingbird nest at chest-level in one of the big redwoods, and were present when the two fledglings took off for the first time, streaking together in a spurt of level flight out beyond our yard.
We have encouraged and shaped a Monterey cypress and a Monterey pine in the front yard. They were thronged several times this month by Mountain Chickadees and some other small birds of luxurious yellow plummage. We're shaping the pine so that it can grow tall across our favorite view window, but thin just where we want to see through to the ocean. It was just three feet high when we came; now it uses the ocean breezes to scratch itself way up on the power lines.
We hadn't seen a squirrel in our neighborhood before this week. He walked the power line between the cypress and the pine in the front yard, taking comfort in the ready refuge of our two big trees.
Our Christmas tree is a little Monterey pine in a pot. We'll plant it up on a ridge to give company to a struggling Norfolk pine we put there a couple years ago.
Our trees raise with you a toast of fresh oxygen to the New Year!
- Rob and Linda
Any tree-planters out there? Write me (and Linda).