[jyl]

We have four tall cedar trees along the north side of my house. My treehouse is nestled between two of them. They shield me from a busy street and make the view out my bedroom window look like a forest in the middle of the city.

Two of these trees died and I didn’t notice. I mean, I noticed when they started turning brown, but I’m told that their death starts years before foliage turns brown.

Heat, drought, and beetles. It is getting hotter and drier here in Oregon, and while that still means we are rainy and temperate compared to most of the country, our trees evolved for even rainier and cooler, so they are under stress.

My neighbor is an arborist, and has me watering and beetle/fungus treating the remaining trees. I hope they survive.

One of the dead trees was 50’ tall, the other was about 100’. Bids to remove them were around $3,000, except for one bid. I rented a dumpster and barriered off the sidewalk, my neighbor came over with his gear, climbed up in the trees and took them down in a morning.

It was something to see. He put on bootjacks, rigged up, sent a line up into the shorter tree, took off the limbs and then cut and dropped the trunk in four foot sections. Then he went up into the taller tree, dropped the limbs, sent the top down in 12 foot lengths along a safety line, then a bunch of four foot logs thudding into the yard and he was done. He left the lower 25 feet of the trunks and the more sinuous limbs, so it looks like a gnarled coastal tree and the treehouse is still stabilized.

Apparently there are certain birds that live in dead standing trees, but my neighborhood is pretty manicured so there is a shortage of that habitat, and we decided to provide some.

My son and I carried the logs and branches to the dumpster and my were they heavy. That was my exercise for the day.

Neighbor price was $800. I added a $200 tip and, since I know he also accepts liquid tips, a very nice 1993 Oregon cabernet sauvignon will get dropped over there too.

Moral:
- Stick with your neighbors. I hire and refer people to my neighbors whenever possible, do a lot of work in our neighborhood association, when the Covid downturn hit we started publicizing neighborhood-owned small businesses to support.
- Watch your trees’ health, water and feed them if needed. Water is cheap compared to losing a tree. I could possibly have preserved these trees, if I’d paid attention.

We’re going to plant a walnut there, but I’ll be dead before it’s anything. I really rather have not lost the 100’ tree.