The Dogwood & The Pinecones

The dogwood blossoms picture in my previous post has a story. We had a neighbor who took part in Arbor Day Foundation program that will send you trees indigenous to your area for planting to help keep our planet green. They sent him 50 little trees of all kinds, and he couldn't plant them all on his property. He was begging neighbors to take 1 or 2. We didn't have much room but we took a dogwood, and I've never regretted it. Here it is just in front and to our left of a blue spruce.


Now . . . the blue spruce is one that I bought about 28-29 years ago. It was 12-18 inches tall, and I took a lot of kidding about it. I heard things such as, "Do you realize how slow those things grow? You'll be dead before you can see it!" and "It is too little! It won't make it!" But at that time, we had very limited money, and the price of $1.99 made it worthwhile.

Well, now I get to laugh! It is about 45-50 feet tall, I think. The tree behind it is 80-100 feet tall. Most of all, it is a beautiful, healthy tree. It was a welcome addition to our yard. When we moved in the front yard was completely bare except for grass. It is a very big, corner lot, a bit over 1/3 acre, so that was a LOT of grass. Very plain and blah. Over the years we added many things, and now, people drive by and just stare. I've had people stop and tell me how beautiful it is. It's too much for me to keep up with now, sadly.

Now here's one more tree story. Some very dear neighbors were removing 2 evergreens from their back yard. They were about 10-12 feet, as I recall. They had 5 of them that had been planted too close, and they were beginning to choke each other. My husband decided that he would plant these 2 trees in our yard. Over a weekend my husband and our neighbor gathered all the boys we could find around the 'hood, and they dug the trees up with as much root ball as they could salvage. Then they lifted them with the crane on a tow truck, drove across the street and put them in big holes they had dug in our yard. Sadly, we lost one of them a couple years ago, but for 27 years, they did well. Here is a picture of the remaining tree which, by the way, is the one that produced the pine cone pictures from that previous post. It is taller than the spruce, I'm guessing 60 feet.




And just for fun, here are a couple shots of miscellaneous foliage in my front yard.