Photo of the day today comes from my walk around the property yesterday. The sun is out, sky is blue, and it is so beautiful outside right now but Spring just isn’t quite here yet. I love these tall long needle pines. They don’t care what the season is, no matter if it’s freezing cold or 100*F in August, they stretch out their limbs dressed in green all year long.
Can’t wait to start seeing some leaves on the trees around here, Spring is one of the most beautiful times of the year in Auburn where the streets are lined with flowers. Both of these shots were taken with my iPhone and basically taken right off the phone with a little crop.
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I didn’t really think about it like that until this year, but life seems so fragile sometimes, even if we live out the average life span for this country, we will only see, or recognize, this time comes around 50-80 times on average, if we are lucky. I think the first 5-10 Spring season changes don’t really count since we can’t comprehend what we are looking at, but I have already experienced 37 Spring’s in my life, so as the flowers bloom and leaves start to fill the trees again, I am keenly aware I have about 35 down and 35 to go, so to speak.
I am amazed at God’s symphony that we call Spring. Almost so slowly we don’t notice, the buds on the trees come out and things go from brown to green in a blink of an eye. Last week in what I hope is winter’s last hurrah, I shot some photos of the Dogwood blooms on a tree in front of our house. It survived the snow, the ice, the cold, to bring us the images below. Of course down here in the south, no Spring is complete without the bloom of the yellow pollen from the pines. I took the other shot a few days ago just before all the pods started to release gallons of yellow pollen that now covers every square inch of everything.
These photos are of the Dogwood in bloom just outside out living room window. Just the smallest blooms, waiting for a warmer day to arrive. The closeup of the pine tree below covers us in a bath of yellow pollen for several weeks, but it is still a beautiful sight when you know warmer weather is on its way.
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This weekend was so exhausting and also a little sad. On Saturday we took down about a 50 foot Pine tree we built our house around. When Deb and I picked the spot to build our house, we specifically chose where the house is now built because of this wonderful tree that was always covered with birds. About 6 months ago we started seeing some big changes in our tree as it started to dry out and wither always. Once we realized that it was covered with the Pine Bark Beetle we knew it was to late to save it. It only took a week for it to go from green needles to a completely brown, and dead, tree.
Our tree as it was when the house was being built two years ago, April 2006. We told the builders to not stress out the tree to much but that is like telling boxer to not break this crystal while you fight. They marked it off like this with 2×4′s and up until a few weeks ago it was doing well, but probably was stressed due to the building of the house.
The tree in April 2008 after the pine bark beetle got to it. From my research into the work of the pine bark beetle, they tend to go after a weak tree or one that is prone to disease. Once they get where you can see them in the bark and all the little holes they make in the bark, it is probably to late. The big issue is they can move from tree to tree rather easily and kill large stands of pine trees, but usually healthy trees can fight them off. Hopefully the surrounding trees here can do that since our entire property is covered in pine trees.
The tree as it stands now, the future home of a garden, patio, table, something nice. We didn’t know what exactly we wanted to do with the area yet so we left the stump rather high to be able to come back later and cut it down.
You can see this tree in just about every photo of the building of our house as it progressed (see Footprint for the House), but we knew when we built the house that just the pounding from the building equipment might weaken the tree. It gave us more than two years of great pleasure watching countless birds and squirrels, while providing some nice shade. It was A LOT of work to bring it down and cut up all the branches, especially in 90 degree weather. The video is the tree falling. The tree of course was only feet from our house and we had to bring it down in a small area where it, wouldn’t take out the gutters, the garden, the car, the house, and anyone standing around.
We hit the spot pretty close but it was a tense few seconds when it was finally coming down just to see how close we would get to the mark. It really wasn’t as dramatic a fall as I thought becuase all the branches basically caught the trees fall. Something nice will go in its place, but not any time soon, my muscles hurt.
