Persistence

On the part of the tree, that is.

Here you see Dad in his tractor, pushing at the roots of our chokecherry tree from yet another angle. He has already chewed a pair of six- or eight-inch deep tire holes in the lawn near the centre of the picture, and another pair off to the left out of sight. He stopped several times to cut roots with his chain saw.

It was big for a chokecherry, but chokecherries don't usually even qualify as trees; they're more of a shrub. I couldn't find a good photo of the tree before our onslaught, but this photo gives an idea.

Such a tree-killer I am. We could have just trimmed it back, to get the trucks past it to dump gravel and pour concrete behind the garage, but once I started looking at it closely, I realized that a good pruning to take off all the black knot wouldn't have left much tree. Maybe I'll replace it with an Evans cherry in the next year or two.

So now I look at all that blue sky, and the corpse of the tree shoved over against the garden, and I wonder.

How many gigantic Carboniferous trees went into the fuel for the chainsaw and tractor to take down one Holocene chokecherry?

(Oh, I know, they say the Carboniferous trees went mostly to coal, and the petroleum came mostly from sea creatures, Foraminifera or something. But you get my drift . . . oh, never mind. I'm in a bad mood.)