Crooked Trees

I have not yet gotten good pictures of the crape myrtles up top when they are in bloom. There are 3 near the end of the driveway. The crape myrtle in the middle is a seedling of 'Pink Lace' that I grew from a cutting. The two on each side are its seedlings.

The full size version of the 'Pink Lace' seedling is a magnificent tree, with huge trusses of pink flowers and a graceful semi-weeping habit. It has only one fault: zero fall color. An almost cardinal sin for a crape myrtle, but I'm willing to overlook it because otherwise the tree is so nice. The two seedlings on either side have more than one fault. Like their beautiful seed parent, none of the seedlings have any fall color. In addition, the seedlings just look kind of ...strange. Even though the shade of the nearby tulip poplars never touch the trees, they lean away from the poplars anyway, as though eschewing their company. They look like shrubs and not trees. (In contrast another of the seedlings, near the apple trees, has always looked like a tree.)

I limbed up the seedling below a few years ago in an effort to make it look more tree-like. The twin boys across the street (they were 3 or 4 years old at the time) saw me working me with the loppers and kept asking what I was doing. I just smiled and waved since I didn't know what I was doing, which soon became apparent since the seedling just ended up looking stranger than before. Bob Ross was right. I keep hoping that it will grow and then finally the branches will dip back toward the ground.

I guess I should explain those trash cans. Although I live in the country, I also live at the end of a small subdivision. The trash cans belong to the neighbor, who used to burn trash in them. I don't have many pictures of the other houses because our main view of the neighborhood is what we see after the round the big stand of tulip poplars as we head down the driveway. It's a nice neighborhood. It used to look a little bare but many of the trees are really sizing up now they are 15+ years old. Most of our property is bordered on the east by the neighbor's pastures and fields and to the west by woods.

The cool raspberry seedling is very shrubby and used to be rather spindly at the same time. It has filled in and looks more robust now. Occasionally I think of asking G. to cut down the seedlings, and that if I keep mowing them down with the tractor perhaps they will give up? Perhaps as they mature they will look better. Toward this end they get mulched with hay the horses won't eat.

There are lots of crooked trees around here.

Our two little dwarf apple trees (one died this summer, RIP) have always been very crooked, although they ended up looking quite picturesque and full of character after the course of several growing seasons. Dwarf rootstock tends to be weak and the winds from Hurricane Floyd blew them sideways.

The sweetgum on the left and apricot maple to the right both lean to the north.

The crooked tree to the right used to be in the middle of the woods before a path was cleared to the house. I think eventually the wood's edge will lose its raw spindly look, but it's going to take time.

Check out this crooked tree! We took a day trip to Chapel Hill today since the weather was so cold and windy, I didn't feel like working the horses or in the garden. It's an oak tree at the NC Botanical Garden that was pushed over by the high winds of Hurricane Hazel in 1954 and yet lives.

More on Chapel Hill later; despite the windy days recently, there was quite a bit of fall color left, more than I expected!