We have trees!

At long last, we have trees that we've chosen in our yard! To know why this is so exciting, you have to understand trees and our house. When we moved in, the two elms on the boulevard had just recently fallen victim to Dutch Elm disease. Those of you in the Twin Cities know what a disaster that was... 15 years later, the city planted two maples on the boulevard (we think they won't last as long as they should - many others like them on our block have already died). The year Kendra was born, another maple sprouted in our yard. Several years later, it was reasonably sized and we moved it to the middle of our back yard. Unfortunately, silver maples are really junk trees, and two separate wind storms did it in, in spite of having it bolted together after the first one. I cried the day they took it down. It was just getting big enough to give us some shade.

I'm not so sad now - it would have overwhelmed our yard and we'd never have been able to plant the gardens we have now as it would have been too shady. Well, we knew we wanted some kind of trees, and went to Gertens for a garden plan last year. Our designer came up with two trees that wouldn't get too big or too wide for us. So this last weekennd we went to order them. We found the Ivory Silk Japanese lilac tree (on the right) with no problem, but the other was a bit harder. Every one of the species we were supposed to get had something wrong - they think apple scab. Well, we sure as heck weren't going to buy a diseased tree! So we talked about options, and came up with the one on the left - a Royal Raindrops crabapple. We like it better - mostly because of the bronzy/green leaves.

They're going to be gorgeous - and should give us some shade but not too much. We hope the crab will shade the porch and help it stay a whole lot cooler. Here's what they'll look like when in bloom(in 10 or 15 years...).