Silly Little Country

Backyard Regime Change

For years our backyard has been dominated by a Manitoba Maple; when we did the renovations that oriented us more to the backyard we began to find many of its behaviours unpleasant. It is exceptionally sexually aggressive in the spring, and then grows like mad the rest of the growing year. It casts unwelcome shade, and had provoked our neighbours to desperate attempts to cut off the branches that hung over into their yard. This was no mean feat as the tree shoots upward at a shocking rate.
So we hired a mercenary team, euphemistically called arborists, and the dictator is gone.
In its wake the world is being taken over by almost equally sexually aggressive creatures. Our apple tree, which barely produced two or three flowers in the last years, exploded with flowers, to the delight of early season bumblebees, and is now covered with leaves, and of course growing apples.

A tiny lilac bush in the back, barely able to produce two or three heads of flowers in the past, has come to life. The detritus from their early season reproductive activities, a plethora of apple petals, and then a similar coating of lilac petals, seem to us two humans much preferable to the bizarre and grotesque droppings that came off their predecessor each spring.

There is a certain cruelty to these choices; all these trees are just doing what they know best. And not one of them could have evolved its fundamental behaviour in a world populated by those making today's life and death choices.
The result is that we now have a happy apple and a happy lilac.
And a deposed Manitoba Maple.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:41 PM