End of the Ficus, Part III

  Looking back through all the pictures of the house that I've taken, I realized that I never got a picture of the ficus in all its full sized glory, except as a bare-branched shadow of its former self after the first freeze.  I have pictures of the back yard, where you can see the ficus, but none do it justice.  It just soared over the yard.  The canopy was so thick, we had trouble growing grass beneath it.  We even selected plants that required shade to plant against the porch because they received no direct sun.  

  Teresa started the second day about the same time as the first.  Unlike the first day, the second day was clear and sunny.  And while there was the barest of hints that summer was thinking about ending, it was going to be brutally hot before they were finished.  The majority of the shade in the back yard used come from the ficus, and that was still lying on the ground waiting to be hauled away.  

 This time she brought help, muscle in the form of a 24-year old kid named Sean.  He was bright, intelligent and really hard working.  He went right to work without being told what to do, while Teresa went back to work trying to figure out how to bring down the last two limbs.  The problem was they were too weak to bear any weight.  She couldn't safely put up her ladder to cut the limb in half and bring it down in pieces.   So they decided to pull them down.

  Ficus wood, when dry, is not very heavy, or very strong.   They looped a line over the limb and picked a direction. The lightest of tugs on the line made the brach wobble and dance. Then they pulled, hard.  I think that was when my heart stopped.  Edward caught his breath. There was nothing to do but watch.

  The limb snapped and started toward the house... and missed by no more then six inches!  It clipped the bougainvillea under the back window, scraping the bark, but doing no real damage to the bush.  That's how I know it was that close.  I think the house gods were looking out for us, both Sunday and Wednesday.  I'm thankful.  Once again, the house escaped damage.  The limb that posed the most danger to the house was down.  

  One more to go.  This limb leaned over the chainlink fence.  They had to do the same thing, pull it down, but at least it was being pulled away from the house, this time.  They looped the rope over the last limb, tightened it up and pulled from the park side of the fence.  It snapped, sooner then expected.  And while I only saw it from the corner of my eye, there was an "oh, s**t" moment as Sean turned an ran from the oncoming branch.  It bounced off the fence and shattered into five or more pieces. 

  And that was it.  The threat to the house was over.  The last of the tall limbs were down.  The rest was clean up.

  Teresa took the stump down in pieces.  The first cut revealed the true nature of the ficus.  That it was, in fact, many trees all grown together.  When I planted it, it had been a house plant with many tiny saplings all in one pot.  Over the years they had grown into one massive trunk.  The freezes, it turned out, had killed 90% of those trunks, leaving only a thin sheath of live wood that wrapped just under half way around the base.  When it fell, that living wood flexed but didn't break.  In the wild, Edward and I figure it would have re-rooted, and started over, growing from where it had come to rest.   Before Teresa started cutting it up, the leaves had not even started to wilt.  It was still alive at that point, and that makes me sad.

    It took another hour to load the wood from the ficus onto the trailer they'd brought.  I saved a few logs, some long dead and dry, one from the living wood.  I'll give them time to fully cure.  Maybe one day I'll make something out of them, like the box I made from from Sandy's log.  I'd like to do that.  It will be something to remind me of that once glorious tree.  

    On that low, lonely stump in the back yard, the sap is still running from the live wood.  We're not going to get the stump ground, not yet anyway.  There is a small chance it will put out a shoot, and some part of it will survive.  A small chance that we'll get some part of our ficus back.  Maybe this time, we'll manage it better, and not let it get so big.

  End of the Ficus, Part I

End of the Ficus, Part II

  End of the Ficus, Part III

End of the Ficus, Part I

  When we bought the house, we planted a number of trees and, in one case, two house plants, in the yard.  Those houseplants were ficus trees.  A tropical plant better suited for indoors, even in central Florida, where occasional freezes can kill them.  So when we had a hard freeze in February a few years after we moved in, one of the ficus survived, the other didn't.

  The one that did survive grew into a monster.  It was more than 20 feet high, and more than 30 feet in spread of its canopy.  It hung over the porch as well as the ditch and provided a deep, cool shade for the back of the house.  It had a lovely green canopy and long stringers that hung below the trucks.  I loved that tree.

  Three winters ago we had another hard freeze.  There was nothing we could do but watch.  The ficus was simply too big to protect.  In the days following the freeze it dropped all it's leaves.  It wasn't until the next May that we saw signs of life, with green shoots poking out from the trunk.  We called a tree service and had it trimmed back, hopeful that it would survive.  Chances looked good at that point that it could recover.  

  Two winters ago, we had another hard freeze.  All the new growth from the previous summer was gone.  It proved to be too much.  Only a small portion of the tree survived this time.  As spring warmed to summer, new leaves appeared, but only on the side towards the house.  The rest of the tree was dead.

  Two woodpeckers took up residence in the dead trunks.  One, a red-bellied woodpecker, never did find a mate to share his work.  A second, a downy, carved a hole and raised at least one chick.  

  This summer has been the wettest ever recorded in Florida.  Two tropical storms dumped 9 inches of rain more then the average. When Tropical Storm Debby hung out for three days, one of the dead limbs came down, water logged and heavy.  It fell towards the park, causing no damage.  Tropical Storm, soon to become Hurricane, Isaac also dumped a large amount of rain on the area.  All that dry and rotting wood no doubt soaked it all in.

 That must have finally been too much for the ficus.  As we were starting dinner on Sunday, we both heard and saw it land.  All of the living wood from the tree crashed into the back yard leaving only the dead wood standing.  Incredibly, it fell in the only place if could have fallen in the yard and not done any damage.  It missed the porch by three feet, missed the birdbath by two.  It missed the guy-wires for the power pole in the back yard.  It even missed Jasmine's statue.  It did land on the juniper bush, but I think that will survive.

  We had a tree company out the next day and she gave us a reasonable estimate.  She'll take the whole thing down, but not grind the stump.  Most of the dead roots are already rotted and soft.  It won't take Mother Nature long to claim back the spot.  We'll have to decide if we want to put anything in it's place.   We're going to get a lot more sun on the porch and through the sliding glass.  It would be nice to have a little shade back there.  We'll see.

  And in the mean time, we can watch the sky and the thunderstorm and the rain again.  That's something we haven't been able to do since the ficus grew large enough to shade the house.  And who knows, if there is still some life left in the stump perhaps it will send out new shoots.  Perhaps, like a phoenix it will grow from its own "ashes", consume it's old stump and rise again.  Perhaps we'll see shade from it again.  And if not, it was meant to be.  Mother Nature takes care of her own.  She gave us a magnificent tree, and in the end brought her down safely.  For that, I will be forever thankful.  

End of the Ficus, Part II

Not a good sign....

Our ficus tree is definitely a tropical plant. So much so that it takes freezes hard. Really hard. Two years in a row may be more then it can take.

Last summer, after a particularly tough winter for it, we had it trimmed. The tree was more then 30 feet high and much more then we could handle, especially since part of it hung over the house. The tree had started growing back and looked like it was going to make it. The tree service cut it back to the level where the growing back. We hoped it would fill in over the next few years, shading the porch again as it has for much of the last decade.

This January brought another freeze, and the ficus took it hard again. And while didn't loose all it's leaves like it did the January before, it lost enough of the "new" growth to be concerning.

Fast forward a few months.

We noticed a woodpecker busily tapping away at one of the upper branches, back in April. Then we noticed that many of the big trunk-sized branches had loose bark and fungus growing them. Not just on one, but many of them, all over the tree.

I planted that "tree" when we first moved into the house 17 years ago. It was originally a houseplant consisting of many ficus saplings, all in one pot, I had bought for my apartment when I lived at the Willows. After we'd learned that the former owners had taken out an oak tree to put a pool in the back yard (something that never happened), we planted the ficus as a replacement, along with several other trees. Little did we realize how big it would get, or how we would come to appreciate the shade it provided for the house, the porch and the living room during the brilliant Florida summers.

The other day I noticed something white on one of the trunks. The next round of fungus attacks had begun. While the south part of the tree looks stronger, with it's bright green leaves shiny and looking strong, the north side appears to be struggling, the leaves dull and streaked yellow green.

The question now becomes will the tree as a whole survive? I don't know if what were once individual saplings, are now so merged and intertwined that they are truly one tree, and if so, can it survive half of it's trunk rotting and dying from within. One thing is certain, however, fungus growing on its trunks is not a good sign.

It's hard to say if the tree will survive. The base of this tree as about 3 feet across. It has, or at least it did have, a lot of reserves to survive a freeze. Most of those reserves are exhausted now. I've seen other types of trees survive being hollowed out from within. Maybe this one will also. Only time will tell. Time and no freezes for the next few winters.