Thursday, July 20

This time the trees were in Anne’s yard – in the woodlot behind our house and the pavilion.

A few days earlier a large branch fell on the back of the house and ruined her heating/cooling unit. Another branch went through the roof and into her bathroom. For that reason the carpenter suggested that she should consider taking down the tree in front of her house, as it was quite tall and leaning over the house.

She called two tree service companies, but Amos’ bid was a lot lower – partly because he wanted the wood from the locust tree.

I took a few of these pictures, but Cerwin took most of them as I had work to do in my office. Some were taken with his cell phone and others with my Nikon.

He did his usual good job of taking branches down piece by piece in order to not damage the house.

Then he was ready to drop it. This was an ash tree. There are quite a few ash trees in the woods, which concerns us because of the ash tree borer that is destroying trees in our area.

From the Internet: The emerald ash borer (EAB), Agrilus planipennis, is an invasive highly destructive wood-boring insect that attacks ash trees. It has killed more than 40 million ash trees in the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Maryland, and Illinois. It was detected for the first time in Pennsylvania in late June 2007.

Then it was time to take down the culprit that damaged the house – a very tall, straight locust tree. Amos is hoping to make locust boards or posts out of it. The damaging branch came from high in the tree.

He dropped this one without removing any of the branches.

It makes me sad every time we have to take down a tree in our woodlot, but it is not safe to have some of these old, tall trees close to a house.

We plant new trees when necessary. Sometimes a bit of space is good and causes the trees to spread out and become quite beautiful.