In the garden I have an ornamental Japanese maple tree. It is very pretty in the summer, but during autumn it becomes absolutely gorgeous when it turns a fabulous scarlet colour. It must now be well over 30 years old and is maybe 5 metres high with an 8 metre spread. I am more of a wildlife gardener than a display gardener, but this tree is my pride and joy.
My sister is visiting me for a few months from the Philippines. Never been abroad before. Shame about the weather but nothing much I can do about that.
I came home from work on Tuesday, and she was in the garden, with a big kitchen knife ( typical of a damn woman of course), cutting off the last branch that she could reach. The tree now looks like something out of Africa, with all branches below ten feet or so cropped near the trunk, as if munched by some vertically challenged giraffe. Trees have value, and this week the maple has much in common with Northern Rock shares. I wouldn’t have sold it, ever, but its value would have been quite great last week. I was heartbroken, and although I do not swear except under extreme provocation, I came close to exhausting most of the more obscure corners of the OED, together with using a number of Tagalog phrases that would certainly have made my mother blush. It is unlikely that the branches will ever grow back.
However after 4 days I finally managed to laugh at the event enough to be able to relate it to you. I realised that, coming from a hot country which does not really have an autumn, and which has trees that drop their leaves 2 or 3 a day, rather than the whole lot within a few days, she genuinely thought that the tree had died. I realised this when, today, I had to prevent her from “tidying” the front garden as well, and explained again in minute detail exactly what a kitchen knife is designed for, and what it would be used for the next time I found her outside of the kitchen with it. What she had planned to do with the other few million deciduous trees in the county I have no idea.
Ah well, a dead branch is untidy you see. Back home those few fallen leaves would have been swept up from the road/sidewalk on a daily basis, by the nearest householder. Why I don’t know, they have been doing it for decades. The houses are in general kept showroom spotless too, but that is understandable in a country where you get cockroaches no matter how clean the house is, and cleaning minimizes the numbers and certainly helps prevent breeding populations. Then you just get those that fly or crawl in from outside, occasional visitors who find the cupboard bare, and go elsewhere.
Alternatively she cut them off because she was an idiot. I am tending to that theory this evening. But I have calmed down: honest.
My Mother has a Japanese Maple in her garden, it’s the only thing in the entire Garden that I actual like and can name when I see it.
A few years ago, the city was blowing snow into peoples yards to keep the streets clean, which pretty much destroyed the tree, it now grows really oddly.
I would have murdered that woman for doing such a thing to such a large Japanese Maple, it’s one of the most amazing trees there is.
Poor tree, at least you have a funny story to tell about it now:)
It might be normal to cut dead branches off a tree in the Phillippines, but I’m guessing that attempting to tackle a whole tree with a kitchen knife isn’t What was she going to do with the trunk???
The tree should come back, probably not in the same shape but it will sprout new growth in the spring.
We planted a young Japanese Maple in our front yard shortly after moving in 10 years a go. A few years later we put in a sprinkler system in which the water stream from one of the yard sprinklers hit it pretty hard whenever we ran the system. Everything above the point where the water hit it started to die. We transplanted it to where it wouldn’t get blasted and it is doing very well now. Some branches died but others grew and it filled in nicely.
This also reminds me of a story about a friend and their neighbor’s tree. A landscaper was trimming trees across from our friend’s place and seemed to know what he was doing. The friend asked if he could take a caterpillar nest out of a neighbor’s tree that also over hanged their front yard. He must have misunderstood because they came back to find the tree completely “cactussed”. It was nothing but a tall stump with five or so short branches sticking up (for a visual: hold your arm vertically with your fingers in the position you would hold a glass ball). The neighbor got over it and the tree looks great today.
Readers Digest: Heard of it, seen it, but never really been tempted to read it. I wouldn’t want to read anything that might print something I wrote But for both of you: there is a mobile “butty bar” food stall near here that is called the “Feeder’s Digest”. ( It may not have the apostrophe. )
Alas, for maple syrup you need a live tree… tap it, collect the sap, boil it, and you get sweet sweet maple syrup… I’m prolly missing a few steps, but that’s the essence of it… But you’re talking around 40 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup, depending on the grade you want and the type of weather there’s been…
What was she going to do with the trunk???
But for both of you: there is a mobile “butty bar” food stall near here that is called the “Feeder’s Digest”. ( It may not have the apostrophe. )