The Weekly Tree Report - 9/8/25

 The Weekly Tree Report

8/19/25, The Return

    It is wonderful to be back home to where I know. The summer was great, but back with work we come and back comes the Weekly Tree Report. Do not expect consistency. I am taking six APs now. I am in struggle town. But I will try, and I will try indeed, to keep the posts up for as long as I can. Until I become employed, go to college where I run out of time, or some random circumstance, or maybe I get bored, I will continue to work on this blog. Thank you.

Trees as in Life

    Why do we have trees on our planet? For life? For sustenance? Preventative measures? I think the meaning behind trees, or perhaps their purpose, is no more than because they're mesmerizing. When you look at a tree and really think, there is so much history and story to every piece of bark on a tree. What you can sense, feel, smell, see, things that may be hidden; all of these aspects of a tree write a beautiful story that is parallel to our own stories we make throughout our lives. A tree can grow in so many ways, or it can die in certain spots. We can never predict where it will grow or die even if we can manipulate the way a tree grows; we can never predict how a child will behave in the future, regardless of how much or little we parent it. We judge trees off their characteristics just as we make first impressions to other people. A tree carries so much weight on it's back; it holds the responsibility of anchoring the ground, providing shelter and shade to the ecosystem, and sacrificing itself to the biosphere in order to keep biodiversity high. A person carries so much weight on their back; they hold the responsibility of anchoring down society through their occupations, provide shelter to their family and provide our economy with money through taxation and jobs and all the lovely things that come with adulthood, and they build connections amongst themselves, with animals and people, living things and dead things, that keep the world's global structure intact.

    Why do I mention this? It makes you think; are we really so different to trees after all? All it takes is a shift in perspective to understand why people sympathize with trees. Why we nurture them in our gardens, why we build plots and provide them shade and water, why we go out of our way to take them home from stores (even though they are very heavy). Perhaps, this feeling is not in the immediate vicinity of our heart or mind, but the feelings we share with trees lead us to feeling some sort of spiritual connection. So why do you have trees at home?

Crepe Murder

    Have you ever seen a crepe myrtle? I bet you have. They're gorgeous flowering trees that bloom pretty blossoms for very long periods of time. You find them along the sides of schools, in parking lots, wherever you think a flowering plant will fit, a crepe myrtle takes its place. But at the same time, we somehow do not know how to care for these trees, even if they're ornamental. They're planted in the tightest spots, perhaps because parking lots confine the space that you can plant, but their growth is significantly haltered due to the precarious position that they're planted in. More than that though, have you ever seen a crepe myrtle in the winter? If you happen to stumble upon one in a parking lot, they look absolutely hideous. They look like a child's drawing of a tree, skewed and seemingly fake like sculptures. They've been brutally topped and cut back hard so that they sucker out when the spring comes around, but is that really how you should treat a tree? I get that the trees need to be small for the parking lot, but why place them there then? But alas, it is unlikely for any change to be made. That's ok, but can we please stop murdering crepe myrtles?

I Like London Planes

    The good ol' sycamore. Also known as the London Plane. They're very tall, they're very interesting, and they have big leaves. My high school, which can be compared to a prison at the moment, has a lot of them alongst the front lawns. They stand tall, look out to the sky, but they're probably younger than the school. Funnily enough, at the front of my school lays a small uprooted sycamore that is almost dead.

Thank you.