The trees are starting to turn here at Nogglestead:
What the? you might ask. That’s the smallest maple we have here at Nogglestead, although we have many small ones.
The previous owners went maple-nuts with new plantings; they lined the driveway and put a number of young trees in the yard. But they didn’t protect them from neither buck-rubbing (wherein young male deer rub their antlers on trees), deer-nibbling (wherein deer eat the bark around a tree, effectively killing it), or frost-cracking (where the bark splits at the base of the tree from the temperature changes near the ground in the winter). This particular tree had frost cracking and some fungal growth on it, and during a summer storm with seventy-mile-an-hour straight ahead winds, the majority of it toppled over. I cut it off near ground level, but this never-say-die maple threw up a couple of leaves to turn red in October for us.
This maple was joined in calamity by a couple of brethren that I also cut low; however, they threw up enough twiggery to resemble topiary Peckingese:
I’m not kidding about the Peckingese: Sometimes, in the early morning or in the evening twilight, I double-take because I think those runt trees are some sort of short animal.
These trees will soon be joined by the remainder of the maples that the previous owners planted, as they have been ringed by the deer so the maturish top parts are dead and small branches from the root stock have leafed out (so I have maple bushes instead of maple trees). Next spring, I shall probably remove these runts and replace them with leaf-spotting-resistant peach trees that I’ll special order (instead of dropping in the leaf-spotting-OPEN-FOR-BUSINESS peach trees one buys at the local hardware store). Which I will surround by a small fence and coil around their bases so the trees actually grow.
