Happy Birthday Dad

May 1st would have been my father's 77th birthday. I remember him telling me how he loved having his birthday on May Day. As a young boy in Germany, May Day was always a wonderful celebration day.

Dad loved to be outside, he would take us hiking, sledding, skating, berry picking, wandering, beach combing, anything he could think of as long as it was outside.

He died when he was 70 years old and after he passed away friends of mine gave me this beautiful tree to plant in his memory. The tree is an Acer shirasawanum 'Aureum' which is also known as a Moon Maple. I love this tree more than anything else in my garden.

Tonight I spent an hour looking at old digital photos. It seems that Dad's tree usually unfurled it's leaves during the last week of April. It's grown quite a bit since this photo in 2005.

Planted around Dad's tree is a wonderful array of Hosta and shade plants.

Since Dad always had a great sense of humor, this bowling ball and matching shoes were moved from the other side of the garden to rest now under Dad's tree.

This year the most amazing thing happened. The leaves on Dad's tree unfurled on May first, Dad's birthday! I couldn't help but smile all day as I realized that Dad was in the garden with me again.

Happy Birthday Dad, hope you don't mind this post is a bit late, I was busy spending time in the garden :-)

Melanie

Dumb tree

One of the most enlightening blogs I've ever read was Don Engebretson at The Renegade Gardener. For the first time in my life I wasn't embarrassed about being a tree killer. Some trees are just meant to be killed.

Our property really is lovely, unfortunately the two previous owners were neither gardeners nor knew a single thing about landscaping. The last owner actually created several huge landscape faux-pas that would cost six figures to fix the way they should have been done.

I don't know who did the original foundation plantings but a Hemlock (Tsuga) was planted about 3 feet (1 meter) from the foundation of the house. Yup, that was smart. Plant a fast growing tree right next to the house and the big front window and see what happens.

Not only did the tree require constant haircuts just so we could see out the window, but it had the worst case of wooly adelgid you could imagine. Don't tell me about sprays, I have an entire property line of infected Hemlocks and would rather save the money for tree removal.

My husband Don took the above shot while I was unaware. I see he captured my best side.

Four hours later, thanks to Don's amazing talent with a Husqvarna chain saw, we can finally see out of our whole living room window. Now if only I could convince him to take those yews down a foot too.

Of course I realize trees aren't dumb. There are just dumb choices of trees planted in dumb locations all too often by dumb people. If you don't know what I mean, I could show you many more dumb examples.