Two Perspectives on Trees

I grew up one the mile high plateaus of the Rocky Mountains. Plenty of trees but the West is much more arid than where I live now in Durham NC and it took much longer or them to grow.

So I’m always a little taken aback when I run into people who want to clear cut around their homes or don’t appear to value the lush tree canopy we have here.

Then when I saw these two photos on a friend’s blog, Endangered Durham, one taken in 1938 and the other in the present, of a location not far from where I used to live on Knox Street, I could sense a different perspective.

It reminded me of the day on Knox Street when I was raking leaves, lots of Oak tree leaves and my neighbor from across the street came over. He had lived there many decades.

Then along came a man in his ‘90’s who lived up the street. He began using his arms to show me how to prune the Abelia hedge along the drive pointing his hands inward, vs. outward as I had pruned it. He then volunteered that had built that house in 1936 while working as a postman.

Then both men, almost simultaneously looked up at towering 60 foot Oak trees and in unison said, “the house looked just as good before those trees were there."

It was hard for me to believe they had been there before the trees let alone envision the house without them. But one has since been taken down by disease I notice and judging from these photos, they will grow back a lot faster than they would in the Teton-Yellowstone corner of my native Idaho.