Whose Woods These Are I'm Pretty Sure I Know

When we moved to Point Roberts, we bought a little house on a little lot and the lot had a few big trees on it here and there and a few little garden areas and a bunch of lawn. But that was twelve or so years ago, and over that time, we found ourselves buying the surrounding little lots one at a time, until we eventually acquired six of them, about a half acre that includes the house we live in, trees, another house that Ed has been remodeling for the past three years, and a workshop for me in which to do my quilting. Up in Canada, we have two acres of woods and one house, but the difference between two acres of woods in Canada and maybe a quarter acre of woods in Washington (subtracting the lawn-like areas which are flat but have no grass and thus are not really lawns, the ever-expanding gardens, and the three buildings from that larger ½ acre) is substantial.

The difference lies largely in the fact that two acres of trees is a forest that takes care of itself and ¼ acre of trees is land that requires a lot of maintenance. I conducted a survey of our trees today and here is what we have:

2 alders, 4 large maples and 4 small maples, 12 red cedars, 2 laurels, 1 dogwood, 31 Douglas firs, 1 grand fir, 3 willows, 1 pecan, 5 Italian plums, 2 bartlett pears, 1 walnut, 1 fig, 1 Queen Anne cherry, 4 apples, 1 arbutus, and 2 poplars. Fruit trees are not, by nature all that big, although this cherry is a large tree: our ladders do not go high enough to pick up at the top of it. But the rest of these trees range from very big to enormous. I couldn’t begin to put my arms halfway around any of the Douglas firs or cedars, e.g. They are tall enough that bald eagles consider nesting in them each spring. They are a lot of wood, but not a forest. They are more like a park.

Maintenance for a park includes, each spring, gathering up and causing to go away hundreds of branches that break off during winter storms, as well as the occasional tree that comes down (two last year, but none this past winter). The branches are mostly from the Douglas fir trees, but the cedars, alders, and maples also contribute to this general mess. If you cut the wood up to size, you can burn the wood in your fireplace or wood stove. However, we don’t have either of those. So we can find somebody with a chain saw who wants the wood and is willing to come by, cut it, and cart it off, but most people have their own wood mess for those purposes. Or we can pay somebody about $125/hour to chip it up (which we did last year, but we still have 2/3 of those wood chips in piles waiting for me to cart them to somewhere else). We can burn it ourselves in a 1-2 day extravaganza, during which time we make our major contribution to global warming. Or we can carry it back into the far reaches of the park where it will make its own contribution to global warming by decomposing, but over a longer time than 1-2 days. What to do?

The other major maintenance of trees has to do with leaves. A tree in your yard provides you with enough leaves in the fall to rake up. Eight maples, two alders, a dogwood, and a bunch of fruit trees provides you with way more leaves than you are going to be raking up, not least because it is November when they fall and it is raining all the time. So you think about the advantages of letting the leaves remain on the ground all winter where they can provide a little insulation for the plants and bushes in the cold, and where they will do a little composting of their own. But spring comes (as it has come this week), and all those leaves are still there and they’re still wet and they haven’t composted one whit and all the slugs are eating the little plants that they are covering. And when that happens, you know it’s really time to rake the leaves and start the serious composting. So this week has been a week of raking when it’s not raining and carting leaves off to the back of the woods where they will go bit by bit into the composter until the next crop of leaves starts to fall.

These woods are mine, and they sure require a lot of work.