Right next to the house we have two huge, 250-year old sugar maples. One of them, by far the larger, lost its main trunk some years ago, but the right half of the tree remained, with three 50+ foot long, very thick limbs/trunks going off at about a 30-degree angle from the main trunk. I had always marvlled at how the old trunk supported all that weight...
Well, on Friday afternoon a cold front came through with 50-mph winds, and right in the middle we noticed a huge crack start to open up in the main trunk, working down from the top. As the winds blew the entire remaining part of the tree went back and forth and we could see the crack get bigger and then smaller, bigger and then smaller. Suddenly several tons of sugar maple were hanging on by an increasingly small thread...The tree guys took one look at it yesterday morning and shook their heads. So down it cames, before it came down on its own and took out (depending on which way it fell) the carriage house, the kitchen or the porte cochere, removing, whichever way it went, a nice birch which stands directly underneath it.
It's a big, complicated job to get the tree down without smashing things underneath it, and they've been hard at it for two days now. The episode has inspired some psuedo Haiku-
Storm winds make the big tree sway
and wave -how graceful...
What was that odd cracking sound?????
Big tree falls down and goes BOOM!
uh oh... Say Goodbye to
recently re-roofed carriage house.
Storm winds crack the giant tree-
Tree surgeon tells wife-
"Christmas in Bermuda this year!"
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