A New View

For seven years our narrow enclosed back yard has been watched over by pairs of stately aspen trees.

The two tallest on the left are the neighbor's trees, sited between their garage and house, just over the vine covered fence on the other side. The two smaller clumps on the right are ours, shading our deck.

The neighbor's trees were ours, visually. They gave dimension and height to the low horizontal house lines. They gave us afternoon shade -- that shot above is looking due west. 

Their fall color lit up the inside of our house. 

Hummingbirds used the branches for perches to constantly monitor our feeder below. Songbirds gathered to have their meetings in the mornings.

The quaking leaves announced my mornings -- I could see them from my bed as the sun rose and started lighting up each leaf from the top down, pouring liquid gold down each branch until it was time to get up.

And then this happened.

Are you sobbing? I was, even though the poor trees had begun to decline two years ago and actually looked pretty awful in the summer of 2024. It was time for them to go.

Now the view looking west is pretty forlorn.

I've blogged before about the unsuitability of aspens in urban settings. They don't do well below high, cool mountain meadows. We plant them in gravel in a city lot and they grow rapidly and decline quickly. They are clonal organisms that want to spread their far reaching interlaced root systems way, way out.

But they are such pretty trees at first.

The good news is now we can enjoy sunsets. We have no real view from our walled-in yard, but we do see some of the western sky now, and that open gap between the buildings actually draws the eye out and away to some more distant trees beyond. 

Here you go. A November Santa Fe sunset through the gap as seen from our yard now. 

Spectacular, but I miss the trees.