Good Bye, So-Long, Farewell

 Good bye, so-long, farewell – they'll be saying that about me one day. Here today, gone tomorrow.

I've recounted before that I used to work at a Dutchman's nursery in Oregon, and the old windmill came to America after WWII with some horticultural skills to go along with his heavy accent. You could describe the gruff grahtensheider as “wooden shoes,” “wooden head” and “wouldn't listen,” but he carved out a living in Oregon because he was able to get plant starts, and then to sell trees back to his fellow countrymen who were big nursery players in New Jersey, “the Garden State.”

Abies procera 'Glauca Prostrata'

One day I was raking leaves in his yard – as his three sons were too important to do it – and I noticed a prostrate Abies procera (Noble fir) which was about ten feet wide and only one foot tall. He granted permission to cut scions, but warned me that it had no commercial value because it was too slow growing. I cut a dozen side shoots and all grafts lived. A year or two later I staked them so they could spill out evenly from the pot rather than grow sideways in one direction. I planted one in the original Display Garden, but the staking was a bad idea as it refused to grow horizontally, and the photo above was taken when it was about 35 years of age. The Dutchman said the cultivar was 'Glauca Prostrata' and I thusly identified it with a metal garden label, but every year that it continued to grow upward the label became more and more ridiculous.

Abies procera

Abies procera

I enjoyed looking out my office window at the “Glauca Prostrata” for many years, with huge cones at its top, and it was also a favored perch for our resident dove mates. About three years ago it began to look stressed, which I blamed on a long hot summer. I tried to ignore its problems, but eventually determined that it was an eye-sore and the garden would be better off without it. A sapsucker had wrecked havoc on the trunk at about ten feet up, and below that it appeared rotten. Not wanting it to topple in a wind storm I had a professional tree company come take it down. My foreman was a little miffed that I called in the pros, stating that his crew could handle the job, but at this point in my long career I have had no deaths nor serious injuries, and I want it to finish that way.

Three good-looking, strapping, 30-something guys showed up on time as promised...which usually is not the case. I was expecting a couple of ex-cons with cigarettes dangling from their lips, but these pros inspired confidence with their crisp, clean work suits and intelligent demeanor. I left for the other farm so I wouldn't have to listen to chainsaws and the chipper machine, or if they smashed another tree below I didn't want to see it happen. Three hours later I returned to see how they were coming along, and to my amazement the tree was neatly down and they were long gone. Good bye, so-long, farewell.