Globe Willows No More

When we bought our house, it came with two fantastic looking globe willow trees. They had a beautiful half-globe shape which, I think, is pretty unique for a tree. The unfortunate part was that they would constantly drop branches, mostly year-round. If we had some strong wind, we’d go out and find 20-30 branches of varying sizes on the grass out front and that many also on the grass out back. Then, when they dropped their leaves in the fall, it would take forever to go through raking the leaves, multiple times because of how slowly they would fall. Add into the mix all the branches that would also fall. It takes a lot longer to bag leaves when they are almost as many small branches in the mix. So, needless to say, we didn’t enjoy maintaining the trees. They were beautiful trees and provided lots of great shade, but I guess that didn’t overcome their neediness.
The night of November 9, we had a very wet snow for a few hours. Then it turned into a regular snow for the rest of the night. About 10:30, shortly after I had fallen asleep, Sarah woke me up and said we needed to check what had just happened out front; she had heard something loud. I was in one of those incoherent modes, so Sarah went and checked and told me to come look. I went to the front window and noticed that a third of our front tree had split off, right from the trunk and fallen over into the street. I had to be to work at 7am the next morning, so I decided that I would have to wake up at 4:30 to work on cutting the tree out of the street (with my hand saw). I set my alarm and went back to bed. We woke up to probably 10-12 inches of snow on the ground. We checked the windows and found that the front yard tree had once again split off a third at the trunk, right over our driveway and partially hanging from our roof. Then we checked the backyard tree, and saw that it had basically split in half and fallen over into our yard and was resting on the fence. YIKES! I got busy cutting and successfully removed all branches from the road and sidewalk and also from the driveway. Sarah helped by shoveling the foot of snow from the driveway and sidewalk. I went to work a little late, and when I came home, the Elder’s Quorum/Ward had already cut down the tree. They came back the next Saturday (a few days ago) and chopped down the backyard tree. What a help that was! Also, I went and bought a chainsaw, so I could help out with the second round; tree #2. Here are the pictures:

It may not look like a lot branches, but it was.

Pictures make it hard to see scale, but those are some pretty big branches that split off the trunk of the tree.

Backyard tree

Our house, now, without a tree. The backyard tree hadn’t been cut down, when this picture was taken. The snow has now all melted too.