For the Love of My House

The Divine Cabin, love of my life, is not worth salvaging or renovation. Experts have told me this. It's expensive to maintain an 80-year-old largely neglected rental house and yard. I don't grudge the landlord's lack of interest in regular maintenance. They'll come running for anything serious, like the furnace out or a fallen tree blocking the lane. That's better than some.

Before

Yet intuition kept bothering me as I worked in the cabin's "office" and watched through its window the season's first ice storm, followed by snow. I'd been noticing a thick (can't get your arms around it) dead oak next to the house with a very long and hefty horizontal branch -- the tree's only remaining branch -- suspended about 20 feet precisely over the "office" roof. If ice snapped it off, it'd bring a neighboring tree's branch down with it, or the whole tree might fall, for a total of thousands of pounds of momentum to splinter one third of my roof and house.

If the landlord then said the damage was not worth repairing, I'd have to move, breaking both my heart and pocketbook. But they don't do (much) preventive maintenance, and right now the landlord is short-handed and their chief guy is in quarantine. Still, I know it's perilous to ignore a nagging intuition. Sometimes things are up to me.

It's hollow. On the right is my sneaker.

Although as a tenant I could have chosen to "Miss Ann" the landlord and make pestiferous demands for "Now, before the next snowstorm," I elected to hire and pay for a local tree service, called "Get 'Er Done," for removal. The estimate was yesterday. They'd need a lift (pictured above left, in action) and ropes and a crew. For me, peace of mind and disaster averted would be worth the money that by Divine grace I have earned and will spend for the love of my house.

So today after they started sawing, the tree team's boss knocked at my door and told me to come and see how rotten/hollow the branch was (see photo at left) and said they don't know how it hadn't fallen already.

After they sawed the tree trunk into pieces, stacked them, and left, I counted the tree rings: approximately 75. That places its genesis in the year 1946 or so. I am grateful to have shared 20 years living alongside of it, and for my intuition and my job.

Why Healthy Oaks Drop Branches

Heard it about 11 p.m.: Slow cracking and then a whoosh and thump. This is the third time in 14 years so I know what it is, and outdoors with a flashlight--stepping very carefully in case any copperheads are out lounging on the gravel like before--see that one of the twin oaks, tall and very old but thriving, has dropped a huge live branch, blocking the lane but causing no damage. I text the handymen and they chainsaw it up the next morning.

Before they arrived I had a good look at it and wondered why well-leafed oak branches drop and found an excellent online article by Heather Hacking (a fine name for a reporter interested in botany) who interviewed arborist Scot Wineland:

"Trees draw up a tremendous amount of water during the day and release the moisture through their leaves. The process is known as evapotranspiration.

If you tied a plastic bag around a potted plant, the bag would become cloudy as moisture is released to the air. If the tree hasn't had a chance to shed some of that moisture, the "phenomenal weight" of the water can bust a limb.

Sometimes a tree will have an ever-so-slight defect, or a crack. Perhaps woodpeckers or squirrels damaged the limb in a way that leads to a larger crack over time and later decay.

When the limb gets too heavy with water, that crack can lead to a break. There can literally be buckets of water that flows from where the limb breaks, the arborist said."

See the entire article here. It's from the Chico, California Enterprise-Record. Maples and other trees have limb drop, too.

I didn't see any water in the morning, nor any black ants at the core of the fallen branch, but that doesn't mean they weren't there, because my eye is untrained. I am relieved the 25-foot branch didn't fall on anyone or anything.

The Survivor

I admit trying to kill this red-cedar tree for the sake of the native oaks and hickories the invasive red cedars are displacing. Baby cedar trees plant themselves mere inches in front of baby oaks, choking off  their sunlight and selfishly drinking all the water. In spring I chop down or uproot any young cedars endangering the oaks.If they're too big to chop, I might strip some or all branches so at least they won't block sunlight from the other trees that deserve to live here.

I learned from red cedars that everything in nature wants the best for itself and will do all in its power to survive.

Don't recall exactly when and what I did to this tree, but it outsmarted me. It looks very happy and blithe. As you see, there are still plenty of grown red cedars around for them that likes 'em.

Tiny Orange Fungi

To the best of my research ability, the electric-orange embroidery on this fallen branch of dead, wet oak is fresh Phlebia radiata, in its rarely-seen early phase. Usually we see Phlebia after it has all spread and grown together, dried out, and formed a greenish-brownish-white crust or medallion that I always took for lichen. Found this branch lying by the garage while I had my eyes pensively downcast. You can't stay downcast long in the country, where marvels upon marvels are everywhere, including beneath your feet, and death is just a phase in the cycle of life. I heart the mysterious and colorful world of fungi and might have become a mycologist had I known it was an option.

Do You Think It's Time?

It's growing out of the garage gutter, 12 feet above the ground, too high for any but a skilled handyman to reach, and anyway the garage roof is too sharply pitched for me to dare to climb on. I planted sunflowers in the meadow when I moved here 11 years ago and deer snapped 'em up before they even bloomed. Didn't try it again. This sunflower is a volunteer, and the only blooming sunflower on this property because it's out of deer range. The garage gutter, to my knowledge, has not been cleaned in a decade and is full of broken twigs and branches flung from the very dead oak you can see in the background. I sent this photo to the landlord to say that while I enjoy the flower, maybe it's time to do some upkeep.