Trees!

As I mentioned in Spring Cleaning, our block filled out a request to get trees from the city to put in our planting strip (the area between the sidewalk and the street). Well, the trees (15 in all) were delivered on Thursday and we had a neighborhood planting on Saturday. We had six varieties delivered: Red Maple, Sugar Maple, Oregon White Oak, Golden Locust, Silver Linden, and Jacquemont Birch. Of course, there are already quite a few trees on the block to add to species diversity such as redbuds, holly, some other ancient (and gigantic) maples, and some other trees whose names escape me.

The trees were a lot bigger than we were expecting. We had to attend a tree planting class the other weekend and the demo tree that was planted was maybe half the height of the trees we received. The Red Maples were the tallest by far, but all the trees were surprisingly substantial.

It was a lot of hard work planting and, who-doggy, was my upper body sore later that night. The hardest part, by far, was cleaning off the root ball and making sure the roots were not tangled around each other. We learned at the planting class that if you plant the tree as is from the container the roots may not know that they out of the container and will continue to wrap around instead of traveling out and creating a supportive structure. In 10-20 years the tree could just- BOOM- topple over one day because the roots had kept that original restrictive ball.  

Here are the roots of our Silver Linden after some extensive work.  We had to cut away some of the roots that were too tangled;  that is okay though, because the cuts will support new growth.

 Here is the Silver Linden all planted and ready to grow. One day it will look like this:

We also planted a Jacquemont Birch on our strip. Our first choice was a Chinese Paper Birch, but I guess they were not able to get one so we wound up with our alternate, the Jacquemont.  

Here I am working on the birch’s root ball while Bill puts the finishing touches on the hole. The birch’s roots were much easier to seperate than the linden because the birch had been kept in a bag container that had quite a bit more give and flexibility than the regular plastic container.  

It will be so nice when the trees have matured a bit. We now no longer have a treeless lot! So exciting. Now we will just have to go and purchase trees for ourselves to plan in our front, back, and side yard.

All in all our neighbors planted 8 trees on Saturday. We have 7 more still sitting in our side yard waiting to be planted… This was a nice neighborhood activity which will benefit us all for years to come.

It sure will be lovely as our trees grow and one day we will have a gorgeous tree lined street like the image above.