Arboricide

My neighbor Sally did in the vast Aleppo pine that she’s hated with verve for many years.

I understand her issue: they’re radically messy. Aleppo pines, which were very popular here when our houses were built in the 1970s, are fast-growing and more or less xeric. They tolerate heat and drought pretty well. But they get to be huge, and in the powerful winds that roar through here in the summertime, limbs the size of a whole tree will snap off and land on people’s homes.

The house that was flattened during the late, great tornado was smushed by an Aleppo.

The other drawback to this vastly shady tree is that it sheds copiously. In the summer when the monsoon winds blow through, a mature tree will cover your yard, your neighbors’ yards, the sidewalks, and the street for half-a-block around in a layer of sharp brown dead pine needles. It’s a huge mess to clean up, and neighbors of the less laid-back variety can get quite irked, especially when the mess falls into their pools.

Sally has wanted to be rid of that tree for a long time, but her companion of many years, Katherine, would have none of it. Katherine finally passed, after an unholy long, slow death from the awful aftereffects of a stroke. Sally cared for her during the decade it took for her to die, a crushing job. Sally used to say that there were many things she wanted to do to improve the house, but she couldn’t, because having workers around would upset Katherine, as would any significant change in their environment. So she’s let things go for a long time.

With Katherine gone and herself finally recovered from the exhaustion brought on by caring for an invalid, Sally has gone to town with fixing up the house. She tiled the back patio and pulled out a decrepit hot tub, replacing it with new patio space. And, alas, she got rid of the tree.

The other day three huge trucks pulled up in front of my house, and the forewoman jumped out and started eyeballing Carlos and Inez’s equally gigantic Aleppo. That tree has been well cared for—if you have them thinned once every few years, they pose little threat to surrounding structures—so I was surprised when it looked like they were going to cut it down. Soon enough, though, Carlos and Inez’s daughter came out and chased them off.

They were on the wrong street. This street and the one just to the north, where Sally lives, have the same name; one’s an avenue and one’s a lane. So they drove around the block and alit where they belonged.

At first I hoped maybe she was only having them cut out the dead branches, because that’s where they started. The tree had quite a lot of dead growth. Although they’re xeric, even an Aleppo can’t tolerate the kind of heat and drought we’ve had over the past several years. They do need to be deep-watered when temperatures get ridiculous, as they did last summer when we had a long string of 118-degree days. Quite a few Aleppos in this area have started to die back, because people just can’t afford to let the hose run on the ground for eight or ten hours and then turn around a week later and do it again.

It probably was so stressed it would have died anyway. But it’s too bad. I loved that tree. From my backyard, it filled about a third of the sky. And although it was too far away to cast shade (or pine needles) on my lot, it did soften the glare.

By mid-afternoon, the was gone. And glare was what was left: enough hot, eye-squinching sky to make your head hurt. No joke: it was actually painful to look out from under the patio cover toward the heat-soaked blank spot in the sky.

It’s not cheap to take down a tree like that. One of my neighbors at the old house had two of them taken out of her front yard, to the tune of a thousand bucks apiece. I don’t think Sally is exactly rolling in money…the reason they were living together, from what I can tell, was not that they were lovers but that they had thrown in together to pool their resources so they could spend their old age in a safe neighborhood, a pre-Baby Boom co-housing arrangement. Catherine had been a choir director; I don’t know what Sally did, but it’s pretty clear neither of them earned a lot of money during their working years.

To spend a thousand bucks to lose a big, beautiful old tree…gosh. And wait’ll she sees next month’s power bill! In this climate, a tree like that can save as much as 30 percent on air conditioning. Even at my house, the additional glare and heat pouring in through the empty space where the tree was will probably push the up the bill some.

Wish she’d at least tried cutting out the dead branches before she chopped it down.