Truffula trees

Dr. Seuss is alive and well and living on Beacon Hill in Seattle.

Tree pose

I can’t tell you how many times I looked out the window at my mostly-dead Mimosa and thought “I could just take that down myself”. Luckily, two things prevented me from making any foolish attempt: The only saw in my actual possession is a Silky Pocket Boy; and I have a friend/fake brother who owns a tree care business (WhippleTreeLLC, 508-55-trees – awesome website – and blog?- coming soon). For the price of a trade that I didn’t even have to fulfill (Z has the skills E was after), I had the pleasure of watching my beloved gay tree felled by a very skilled tree yogi. I freely confess that I have trouble doing anything resembling these yoga poses on terra firma without falling over. I would also like to make a note here that landscrapers – your average mow and blow joes – should generally not be allowed anywhere near your trees even if they’re willing to send an underpaid and under-educated employee out on a cantilevered hydraulic limb during a windstorm. Hire a professional arborist. It’s also worth considering that any arborist without a boom truck in their fleet probably actually still knows how to climb and will not turn down a job for being unable to get their truck near your tree. Any arborist worth the title should know how to prune without leaving cringetastic stubs and how to drop a tree without bouncing branches off of power lines, your house or your garden. Take it from me, hire a professional. They’re totally fun to watch.

Have you done the tree work yourself (confess it – I know some of you have) or have you hired a professional? Did you watch?

Picture this January

I used to enter art competitions occasionally. I never had any particular ambition when it came to my paintings but got a little thrill out of showing them – whenever the work was accepted. (More often than not, it got the big R – but when you paint tiny, quiet things you get used to them not catching the juror’s eye.) I think I must have a little more ambition when it comes to writing – or for whatever reason, I’d rather write if I think someone somewhere might read it. (Thanks, you guys!) But I’ve resisted entering the various interweb and garden blogger competitions because 1. I don’t think it’s appropriate to compete from my work blog (in a very sideways way I get paid for doing that blog) and 2. here at home, I generally just don’t care enough.

Until now. I’m entering my ‘black and white and flamingo’ picture (already shown in my last post) in Gardening Gone Wild’s Picture This photo contest. Not because I care about winning but because I think it fits their winter-y criteria so perfectly I’d be a stupid-head not to try. And secretly, I get a little thrill out of showing it off again.

– This is not my garden. I took it on a dog walk at Juniper Hill Cemetery. Just to the right of the shot were graves incongruously decorated with flags (else they would have been included).