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Day 29: Just one more day to go
Today was day 29 and I was so excited. There were so many exciting things about today’s planting. The weather was amazing (29 days, tons of rain in Indy, but none while I was planting), I had a special guest, and it was one of my favorite trees.
So I think I have mentioned a lot of favorite trees this month, but there are 3. The Ohio Buckeye, a Weeping Willow that sits next to a pond, and today’s tree, a Tulip Poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera). At my parent’s home in Columbus Ohio is a 45 year old Tulip Poplar. It is a gorgeous tree and I have so many memories of it. It wasn’t a tree I could ever climb, but I remember throwing pitches at it. I have one memory of shaking up a soda can and tying it to the tree. I then threw a Chinese Star at it with images in my mind of a huge carbonation explosion. Okay, this was an awful idea and I don’t recommend it. I’m sure I could have hurt the tree. The actual result was I missed the can (and the tree) and the star went flying into my parent’s shrubs. I found it two years later in the mulch.
When I was in high school the tree was struck by lightning. I recall a discussion where my parents were considering having it torn down. I’m so glad they didn’t, because it is once again a beautiful tree and a real eye catcher. The flowers that it produces each spring really are breath-taking. One day, when I have bit bigger yard, I will look forward to having both a Buckeye and Poplar to enjoy every day. Maybe I’ll even be able to position them to have a hammock in between!
If you read the article Erica Smith did on my 30 day quest you read about the two people who started me down this path. It was my wife Maureen, and our friend Jessica. 8 years ago when Jess got back from Peace Corps she lived with me and Maureen. In the friendliest of senses, it was like the two of them ganged up on me. More than anything else, I was being exposed to points of view and ways of doing things I had never considered. I look back at my reactions to certain things Jess did now and I just laugh. I remember visiting her after she moved out and she showed me something called a compost bin. I was utterly disgusted by it and couldn’t imagine anyone actually having one of these things in their yard. Yeah, so now I have two of them.
As we were planting today she shared her perspective on being green, which is really just her perspective on how she lives her life. She doesn’t think of herself as a green person, she just lives her life in a way she thinks makes sense. Now a lot of the things she does happen to fall under the definition of being green, but she isn’t doing them to be green. She is just doing them. She has composted her whole life. Her mom was doing it before it was the hip thing to do.
So today, I got to teach her a few things about planting. I took her through the whole speil of root flares, the proper depth, how to mulch. Everything I have written about or bored people with when they ask me about planting trees. After we got the tree in the ground, we then went back to her house where we made sure to pull back the mulch to expose the flare on her trees too.
More than anything else it was just fun. It was a great way to spend 30 minutes with a friend, and together we helped a neighborhood take another small step forward.
