Polly - What I have problems with people cutting trees is cutting them to plant grass. Trees are useful. Grass is wasteful. Even cutting down Christmas trees from a farm is not a bad thing: young pine trees grow much faster than older trees, thus absorbing more CO2. And as long as the tree is turned into mulch, which then gives the soil back it's nutrients, it's all 100% good. It's when the tree is sprayed with flocking or other crap (which my father did every year even though I was deathly allergic to the flocking, would be wheezing for days after he sprayed a minimum of 6 cans of the crap while smoking a cigarette) and then thrown in the garbage where it does no good...
I've posted this before, but not here. When DH & I were looking to buy our first house in '05, I had a few stipulations: 1) no HOA (hate them) 2) had to have a basement 3) single story ranch, 4) mature non-grass yard (if possible). DH added that it had to have AC, I countered with a swamp cooler. We found a house on the 2nd day of looking.. it was in an area I had looked in before but not seriously (just fiddlefarting on realtor.com The house wasn't the biggest or the prettiest or the fanciest, but it fit the bill as far as ranch/basement/no HOA, and most importantly, a yard that was perfect for what I wanted. It had a giant mature aspen in the front (37' tall), the massive juniper (that's when I found out I was allergic), a gorgeous green ash tree about 25', and a humungo silver maple. The house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, so I have a pie-wedge. The front yard is closet sized (like the narrowest part is 12', the widest part is like 35' by like 90' long), but the back yard is 174' long by 61' on one side & 82' on the other. It's the largest lot in my neighborhood and I *love* it.
We bought it in August, 2005. (August 26th, 2005 to be exact.) When we were signing paperwork, and then I gave them the cashier's check for a little over $7,000 (the most amount of money I've ever had in my life that was mine), they handed me 2 keys. I looked at the keys and say, "You know, I can go to Walmart and buy these for 98 cents." The lady laughed and said, "But these come with a free house!" Oooh, big difference there.
Scary feeling buying a house.
Fast forward to Oct 10, 2005, not quite 2 months later. The night previous, the weather had predicted a small snow storm to come through & give us a dusting. Sure, it was a little early, but not that big of a deal. Sometime through the night, though, the wind changed & blew from west to east and went from east to west. And here in the D-metro, any time the wind blows "backwards" against the mountains, that's gonna be a huge snow storm. We ended up getting over 2' of snow with that storm. And this was a heavy wet sloppy snow. I'd gotten up at about 7 to get ready for work by 9, and when I looked out my bedroom window & saw the snow piled up in the window well, I figured I needed to go outside & brush it off the trees, too. You see, we hadn't gotten a killing frost yet so all the trees were still fully leafed out. I went upstairs & started to put on my snow boots and was startled by hearing this:
That's my beautiful 25' green ash tree, broken right where the crown starts. There was no saving that tree.
I've since added new trees to the back yard ("Hot Wings" maple, Golden Chain, Golden Rain, Thunderchild plum, Indian Magic crabapple, Canadian Red Chokecherry, Princeton Gold Maple, Sunburst locust, Wate's Gold pine, hillside gold pine, and a flame maple), but to have lost that mature tree like that? I wanted to cry.
