Tree Invasion
We have a couple of trees in our front yard which are volunteers -- that is, they just grew on their own. One's the Chilean mesquite of which I've written before, and the other is... well, I have no idea what it is, but it is evergreen, extremely drought resistant, has tripinnate lanceolate leaves, sprays of tiny, barely visible yellow-green flowers, and produces zillions of tiny round papery seeds. They grow absolutely everywhere around here. We have to pull up seedlings from the Mystery Tree all the time, but in the last couple of weeks, it's outdone itself.
We don't usually get as many mesquite seedlings, as it produces pods which, in the normal course of things, are supposed to be eaten by deer or cattle, who then obligingly distribute the seeds elsewhere after their digestive system has broken down the pods. We do not have deer or cattle, but we do have cars, which run over the pods which drop into the street and break out the seeds. Earlier this summer, we swept up a lot of the seeds from the street and scattered them along the curb to the north of the tree, which is just west of our back yard. The hope was that maybe one or two of them would sprout and eventually, in fifteen or twenty years, they'd shade the back yard the way the current tree does the side yard.
It turns out that when you get five to six inches of rain inside of a week, you don't get one or two mesquite seedlings. You get hundreds. Maybe thousands. They are EVERYWHERE. I am torn between the desire to just let them go and see how many survive, and the certain knowledge that if even one in a hundred lasts through next summer, we will have a whole damned forest on the curb.
There is a certain allure to this idea.
And its offspring:
The mesquite (looking sad after losing most of its branches in storms over the summer):
And its offspring:
Rants Talk to me
We don't usually get as many mesquite seedlings, as it produces pods which, in the normal course of things, are supposed to be eaten by deer or cattle, who then obligingly distribute the seeds elsewhere after their digestive system has broken down the pods. We do not have deer or cattle, but we do have cars, which run over the pods which drop into the street and break out the seeds. Earlier this summer, we swept up a lot of the seeds from the street and scattered them along the curb to the north of the tree, which is just west of our back yard. The hope was that maybe one or two of them would sprout and eventually, in fifteen or twenty years, they'd shade the back yard the way the current tree does the side yard.
It turns out that when you get five to six inches of rain inside of a week, you don't get one or two mesquite seedlings. You get hundreds. Maybe thousands. They are EVERYWHERE. I am torn between the desire to just let them go and see how many survive, and the certain knowledge that if even one in a hundred lasts through next summer, we will have a whole damned forest on the curb.
There is a certain allure to this idea.
And its offspring:
The mesquite (looking sad after losing most of its branches in storms over the summer):
And its offspring:
Rants Talk to me