The bleeding tree
My plum tree is bleeding. My gardener came while I was out on Friday, and took it into his head to quote, prune, unquote my trees. It was a wholesale massacre. I'm not even going to get into what he did to the glorious 20-foot tall pine out front. And the carambola tree that isn't even mine, which hangs over the neighbour's wall, providing a handy screen between my house and theirs. But what he did to my plum tree made me weep.
He butchered it. I counted 17 major limbs that he has lopped off, for some obscure reason assuming that I wanted them gone. Oh, my god, I have been complaining to everyone (except him, he conveniently doesn't have a cell phone) but nobody seems to understand how I feel about it.
Now, it isn't the plums you might be thinking about. It isn't one of those round purple things you get in North America and Europe. It's what we call a Jamaica plum, a fat red thing with an outie navel at the end. I planted that tree when I first moved into here, 8 years ago. It was just a stump. And it blossomed into a glory to behold.
And it is deeply entrenched in my heart. The day we brought Riley home from the hospital, my mother was up in it, picking plums (it bears in May) waiting for us. Throughout my maternity leave, I used to go there in the morning and sit under it in the shade, and let him look up into the branches.
With Megan, same thing. We used to walk out there in the morning and enjoy the coolest part of my yard. And when plums came into season we had an embarrassment of plums, a carpet of them covering the ground. People used to come and help themselves to those that hanged over the fence. It was always full of birds. And the branches were low enough for Riley to pick his own, and even Megan used to reach up and touch the leaves.
No more. He's gone and butchered it like Jack the Ripper, lopping off limbs ad hock, with not a branch within reach being allowed to survive. and I feel as though I've been physically attacked. I went to visit it today, and it's still bleeding, hugs gobs of sap falling down to the earth. Oh, my. I feel like I'm grieving for someone I lost.
He butchered it. I counted 17 major limbs that he has lopped off, for some obscure reason assuming that I wanted them gone. Oh, my god, I have been complaining to everyone (except him, he conveniently doesn't have a cell phone) but nobody seems to understand how I feel about it.
Now, it isn't the plums you might be thinking about. It isn't one of those round purple things you get in North America and Europe. It's what we call a Jamaica plum, a fat red thing with an outie navel at the end. I planted that tree when I first moved into here, 8 years ago. It was just a stump. And it blossomed into a glory to behold.
And it is deeply entrenched in my heart. The day we brought Riley home from the hospital, my mother was up in it, picking plums (it bears in May) waiting for us. Throughout my maternity leave, I used to go there in the morning and sit under it in the shade, and let him look up into the branches.
With Megan, same thing. We used to walk out there in the morning and enjoy the coolest part of my yard. And when plums came into season we had an embarrassment of plums, a carpet of them covering the ground. People used to come and help themselves to those that hanged over the fence. It was always full of birds. And the branches were low enough for Riley to pick his own, and even Megan used to reach up and touch the leaves.
No more. He's gone and butchered it like Jack the Ripper, lopping off limbs ad hock, with not a branch within reach being allowed to survive. and I feel as though I've been physically attacked. I went to visit it today, and it's still bleeding, hugs gobs of sap falling down to the earth. Oh, my. I feel like I'm grieving for someone I lost.
posted by Roslyn | 4:30 PM
1 Comments:
Oh, how terrible, I'm a tree person so I kind of know what you are feeling. We had a GLORIOUS tree in our yard that my dad cut down because he didn't want to deal with the leaves anymore and it hurt my heart, I actually cried at that but, no one understood why. That really is a shame.
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