There is an old, small cemetery not too far from my house. For years it had been neglected. Two years ago an Army Reserve unit made it a summer project to restore the place. That the cemetery contained graves of veteran soldiers from as long ago as the Civil War. I believe was the impetus.
Anyway, they did some stupid things, like regrade the soil around some old Sycamores to the tune of some six additional feet. I predicted the trees would die within three years. That actually died within one. But mostly they did a great job of removing debris, weeds, honeysuckle and other weed species and of righting headstones. I now go there to visit once a month or so to check in on some nice old oaks, a pair of blue ash, and a grove of nice, big Aesculus flava, one of which I'll include a photo of.
But a few of those Aesculus flava, I noticed, were being choked by bittersweet and English ivy, and I had made a point of at some future time I would bring my pruning saw and relieve those trees of this burden. Today was that day.
These trees are at the very back of the cemetery, down a fairly steep incline, right at the edge of a woods, completely out of view from the road or anywhere else except for a small area within the graveyard itself. I had no reason to feel like anyone else in the world had ever noticed, appreciated, or cared in any way for this small grouping of trees. The city pays a contractor to mow the grass, but that is the only official attention it ever gets. Well, I'm back there cutting through arm-thick bittersweet vines when I suddenly discovered that someone had beaten me to it. At least on a few trees, on some vines, someone had sawed through them.
Now, I know this person would be as surprised by my follow-up efforts as I was of their's, so they were in no way trying to communicate with me or anyone else. They were just doing what they could to help out a cool group of trees. But it sure was a nice thing to see from my stand point. And, if they ever come back to do more work, hopefully they will feel all warm and fuzzy about someone else feeling the same as they do. (And they will benefit from the display of my superior technique! Instead of a single, severing cut, I make two cuts and knock out the chunk in between, thus allowing no chance of the cut somehow grafting back together!) LOL
And the moral of this story? It's easy to believe that there are but a few of us out there who know and care and do; but maybe there aren't so few as we think.
Scott
This message was edited Nov 1, 2006 5:36 PM
