This weekend, some jerk or tribe of jerks tried to tear down the tree in my treebox.
The amount of time I then devote to trying to ‘fix’ the problem made me think about another aspect of care of things in the public space, you can’t force people to care. Yes, you can have laws against destroying trees in treeboxes, but there are laws against breaking into people’s cars and that hasn’t seemed to stop glittery piles of glass from appearing in the hood. What I’m thinking about is the care on the side of the people of the block.
A few months ago I got into one of those on-line arguments about watering trees the city decides to plop in front of your house or business without your permission or buy-in and then tells you to water the blasted thing. I still stand on the necessity of buy-in from the community and the person/persons who will need to water the tree. Because besides watering the tree you need people to care about it when it is attacked by vandals, knocked over by people in SUVs who haven’t mastered parallel parking and playful kids who misjudged their weight and the tree’s strength. Then there are the weeds that grow around it because of the crappy mulching the city does.
So I spent some time hunting down friends and neighbor’s who knew trees to figured if the damaged branch could be saved. Answer, no. But it seemed that what remained may be salvaged. Thinking back, if this damage had happened when the tree was first put in, after the city ripped out my mum and the railroad ties I installed to put it in, I wouldn’t have cared and would have left it to die.