Survivors
Those of you with good memories might remember I promised (or threatened, depending on your point of view, I guess) to tell you about the surprising survival of a couple of the trees we planted. Those of you with even better memories might even remember us planting them! We certainly do! Wow. Three whole years ago!
For a long, long time we thought that all of them had died. Every last one. In fact the golden elm seemed to have been run over with a hay mower for good measure, just to make sure it was dead. But we randomly stumbled across the shattered stump of the stake that was holding it up the other week, and when we looked down next to that we saw the little stump had sprouted a little! So we kept watering it, and today I trimmed the “lawn” around it a bit, so hopefully it will survive. And grow up a little bit! As long as the resident hares leave it alone, I guess it’s got a chance…
The red maple up the front managed to avoid the severe haircut that the golden elm experienced, but again we thought it had died a long time ago. But when we removed the tree guard we found a few little buds on the trees that have since exploded into life.
Just a pity that both of them are more or less in the wrong place. The maple’s in the natives spot, and the elm will block sun where we don’t want sun blocked. Ho hum. We’ll just have to find a way around those a bit later. Maybe we can just keep the elm at a nice low height. It seems to like it! But in the meantime we’ll just hope they stay alive a bit longer.