Esperanza has a horrid, Brigadoonish*, feel about it.  Alright, it isn’t horrid. It is lovely, I like the musical. But the fact is that being outside of time can’t happen, when it does…Brigadoon actually has a rather dark underside to the story and the older tales it is based on are darker still.

But I was fretfully contemplating a few trees in various stages of mature/decline/stone Dead.  Trees should outlive people, that is one of the points about planting them.  But they still die. Just like people, just like pets. When you have a history going back 140 plus years, some trees, important trees, will die.

It’s a long list. There was a horse chestnut on the east lawn in the 1870’s, that was gone by the 1890’s, two big maples on the north lawn, two big elms, we are on our second copper beech, at least four full sized white pines, one of the big Norway Spruces*, the old cottonwood, several white birches, several huge apple trees, several full sized sugar maples, at least one Norway maple, several hemlocks….

And those are just the trees that spring to mind and were big enough to require outside help in removal…

Sometimes I wonder, what hell would it be to live forever?

 

*The others are just as big now, 80-100+ feet, but this was one of the originals.