Come on, honey, let’s help little Jake and Jessica plant a little tree. They will be able to come back when they are adults and see how it has grown.”
Come on, honey, let’s help little Jake and Jessica plant a little tree.
They will be able to come back when they are adults and see how it has grown.”
There must have been a lot of Jakes and Jessicas living in my neighborhood
35 or so years ago.
Our neighborhood is blessed with boulevards divided by 8-feet wide, curbed,
dirt-filled mediums. The effect helps one notice less he or she is in a featureless
subdivision and not a countryside.
The mediums serve several purposes, the main one of which is being a receptacle
for all kinds of odds and ends that people put on them. There is the understanding
that if anyone finds them usable, they can pick them up. All they need do is
beat the garbage trucks to them. Sort of like a free garage sale.
The mediums served another purpose years ago. If some homeowners had plants
left over, rather than waste them, they could plant them in the mediums. So,
the mediums have stuff growing in them. The forestry service must have had an
abundance of pine seedlings left over one year a few decades ago and sold them
cheap. On every stretch of medium, pine trees grow.
One can imagine that for the first few decades they grew, they were beautiful
and harmless. Now, they are not beautiful and they surely are not harmless.
The trunks of most of the pines reach within only a couple or three feet from
the medium’s curbs. They shed blankets of pine straw and cones year after
year.
The root systems necessary to sustain the trees that now tower 30 to 40 feet
are immense. They reach under the streets for the moisture from the well-watered
lawns.
The roots push up sections of the concrete streets, causing ugly cracks and
bulges where one side of the crack is two to four inches above the other side.
Great on automobiles. One bulge stops the water from what would be its normal
flow, and another bulge stops the water from going the other way resulting in
large lakes throughout the neighborhood.
Kids have a wonderful time in the streets when rain falls. They have built
waterparks on some lakes and race sailboats on others.
I have heard of “enjoying the shade of trees that someone else planted
years ago.” That is good. There is also a down side. “Suffer the consequences
of a tree planted in the wrong place.”
Presently, crews are cutting down the pine trees in our mediums. That little
seedling that was probably free now costs from $600 to $1,500 to remove.
Much of what we do today affects the future. A wise person plants good trees
in right places and resists the temptation to plant them where someday, someone
has got to put up with their damage and/or cut them down. Both are very troublesome
and costly, but they cannot just be left there to destroy everything within
reach.
Churches could learn from planting trees.