It looks like we’re going to have to give my plum tree palliative care. It did yield maybe a dozen plums this year; some years there are hundreds. Well, that was before the fire. Today we finally got around to chainsawing the obviously dead branches (thanks to our friend Hugh), but upon sawing off some of the big branches, Shea discovered that the disease and death of this tree are already in the works. AI agreed that this tree is on borrowed time when Shea showed it the condition of the trunk’s cross-section. For now, the few productive branches are being left, but to avoid a sudden failure, even if it would not likely cause much damage, I will have to hire an arborist to do a full removal of the root system. The good news is that this will create a path that will be navigable next to the back deck column that the tree was somewhat obstructing. Another silver lining is that there will be more sun reaching the plants underneath the tree during the summer. My realization in these past few weeks is that the tree was actually very much damaged by the fire, much more than I originally thought. The fire did, after all, start only a few feet away from this tree trunk. That means that the insurance should reimburse me for the expenses of its removal. Shea did a lot of labor helping to cut up the branches into manageable pieces. Some of them we will “chop and drop” since I’m a strong believer in putting carbon back into the ground.

Keep in mind all the green leaves you see near this tree are from another plant. Only the purple leaves are from the plum tree.