Guess This Counts as “Progress” Too
As I write this, a crew is busy cutting down and disposing of the giant tree that lies between my house and my neighbor’s. She’s been wanting to cut it down for a while now — at least since last summer — and announced early this week that a crew would be coming to do the big chop on Thursday. Her motivation is because it’s tearing up her driveway and (she thinks) her foundation. When last summer passed and it still stood, I held out hope that my neighbor had changed her mind due to the cost, but no such luck. I’m no tree-hugger, really, but it’s just kind of sad to realize that it’s going to be gone when I get home from work.
It’s a huge tree — at least 15 feet around at its base and maybe 200 feet tall — I’m bad at the estimates, but it’s twice again the height of any house on the block. I can’t imagine how bare and exposed it’ll feel once its gone, not to mention how hot that side of our house will get, though it’ll probably be better for our roof and gutters, not to mention the sap it drops onto the windshields that turns into an impenetrable crust.
And the dog’ll miss the squirrels and raccoons that use it for shelter. But I’ll miss it. It was a good landmark when we moved in and will take some time to get used to its absence. It wasn’t all that long ago that our entire block was only trees, as the first house on our block was built in 1919.
Hard to tell from the photo without seeing the needles but it looks like either a cedar, redwood, or sequoia tree. If it is a cedar, then thats a crying shame because they are native and it takes a long time to grow something that big and beautiful. If it’s a redwood, they were once long ago native but as climate cooled they marched south a bit. Easy enough to grow and they grow fast so less sad than losing a cedar but sad still.
We have a cedar deodora in front of our house that is enormous. It is not native and it also drops stuff all year round (needles, cones, sticky yellow pollen) but I wouldn’t dream of getting rid of it. As you mentioned: shade, habitat, and the fact that the old woman next door remembers when it was planted!
Its too bad your neighbors tree was (possibly) messing with her foundation and had to go. The number of big old trees in our neighborhoods is one of the things that makes Portland special.
Just a few months after we moved into our house, we got a new neighbor who immediately cut down two big trees in their backyard. Our dining room became inhabitable in the summer afternoons because the shade had been removed.
Just wondering, did anyone check to see if their neighbors got tree-cutting permits? I think for a certain size tree they’re required by the city (but probably not enforced unless someone complains).
my neighbor’s pretty law-and-order abiding, so i’m sure permits were involved. they had a huge crane and such here to tear the thing down.