Saturday, September 17, 2011

The Drowning Victim

I planted my weeping cherry tree in a spot that was too wet for it. It is the perfect spot in visual terms, and a thriving cherry tree would have looked great there, but all the rain that falls on my garden drains past this spot. So the first tree struggled. After that one was killed by the 17-year cicadas, I dug a really big hole and loosened a lot of soil -- a ten dollar hole for a five dollar tree, as the old saw has it -- but that only made the life of the new tree worse. I kept it alive by digging a sand-filled drainage canal to carry water away from it, but it never grew much. The floods of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee finally finished it off. If I can't find a water-tolerant flowering tree, I think I will plant a weeping willow.

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