My wife and I now have one of the most peculiar looking trees in Idaho.
It is, or was, a sweetgum tree. My son and I planted it when he was a kindergartener. He’s now in his early 40s, which gives you an idea of how big it was.
It was one of several trees we planted in the back yard – too close together. You tend to do that when trees are are fresh out of the nursery and not much taller than you are.
You don’t give much thought to their eventually becoming big trees, their branches growing into one another. And if you do, you think of it being so far into the future that you won’t have to worry about it. You’ll have sold the house by then and it will be someone else’s problem.
The thing about the future, though, is that it often tends to come more quickly than we think it will. It doesn’t seem like it from day to day, but in retrospect it seems to have happened almost in a flash. The trees are small and in what doesn’t seem like much time at all they’re towering. The little trees we planted when the house was new have shaded almost the entire back yard.
And that was a problem.
With so much shade, there wasn’t enough sun to grow things. The daylilies are embarrassing. Other daylilies in our neighborhood are several feet tall with verdant stalks and a profusion of blossoms. My daylilies are pitiful runts, just a few inches tall with only a few buds and nary a blossom. A passerby could be forgiven for thinking they were weeds.
My wife’s back-yard tomato plants are better off, but not by much. They’re planted in pots rather than in the ground, which is fortunate because they have to be moved around to catch the sun, a bit like sun worshipers on a beach. A few have blossoms; none have actual tomatoes.
Speaking of sun worshipers, I happen to be married to one. I’m only half joking when telling her that she should donate her body to medical science. She almost never gets sick, and she can lie in the sun for hours with no ill effects. She’s never seen the inside of a dermatology clinic.
So it was a continual source of annoyance to her that there were so few spots in the yard to bake in the sun. Removing one of the trees to allow more sun in the yard wouldn’t have been sad or traumatic for her; she’d have welcomed it.
This brings us to the smaller matter of the pokey balls. Anyone who owns a sweetgum tree is familiar with their unusual seeds. Slightly smaller than ping pong balls, they’re covered with sharp spikes. If you step on one with bare feet, you’ll take care not to do it again. Our grandson Ryan did that when he was small, tearfully lamenting that he had stepped on a “pokey ball.” It was a perfect name for them.
I love trees and hate the idea of cutting one down. But in the case of the sweetgum, it wasn’t hard to make an exception. It was dying. And we certainly wouldn’t miss the pokey balls.
So I called Bob Parziale. A certified arborist, Bob has done work for us in the past and has always done a great job. He quoted us a price to remove it, and we agreed on a date.
When he arrived, we asked him a question he wasn’t expecting: Instead of cutting the tree down to the ground or to a short stump, would he be okay with cutting it to a height of a little over six feet, just above the two lowest limbs, and leaving about two feet of those limbs?
Odd as that sounds, there was a reason for it. For years, those limbs were where we hung a set of chimes and a basket of flowers. If enough of the limbs remained when the rest of the tree was removed, we could still do that.
Bob was fine with that. He had the tree down and gone in about the time it takes me to mow the lawn. And we still had a place to hang our flowers and chimes.
Granted, it does look a bit odd. How many 36-year-old trees are six feet tall with only two limbs the size of salamis? But the flowers still bloom, the chimes still sing, and now there’s a story behind them. We lost a tree, but we gained a conversation piece.
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The Post Malone/Jelly Roll concert at Albertsons Stadium on June 24 attracted, if I’m not mistaken, the biggest crowd for a musical performance in Boise since Garth Brooks played here in 2019.
I live close enough that I could hear the music at my house. Neighbors who live closer and were concerned that the show would keep them awake, however, had nothing to fear. It was over well before most people’s bedtimes.
Though not all that familiar with Malone or Jelly Roll, I was glad that another big-time show returned to Albertsons Stadium. Smaller venues have done a great job of attracting talent, but many of the really big names aren’t interested unless there’s a venue like, well, like Albertsons Stadium with a capacity approaching 40,000.
Country, rap and hip hop are among the most popular types of music these days so there’s every indication that more of those types of acts will be coming there if the stadium continues to host concerts.
But they aren’t the only kinds of music that would draw crowds, and now and then it would be nice to change things up with acts for the generation that started rock and roll. The Rolling Stones, John Fogerty, Stevie Nicks and Paul McCartney are all still touring.
McCartney, winner of 19 Grammy Awards and recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as “the most honored performer and composer in music,” might have enough Idaho fans to fill the stadium twice.
Something for promoters to consider.
Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.
Tim Woodward 