After the Storm

I didn’t finish telling you about this January storm!   It left a huge mess to clean up!  Shady areas took the brunt of falling limbs. I lost many trees and will have to heavily prune a few shrubs, then hope for the best.  I was so sad the morning I discovered how much I’d lost.  For days all I could do was look out the windows at young trees snapped in half and old trees with branches barely hanging on that would need to be sawed off.

The weight of a couple feet of snow, topped with a few inches of freezing rain froze everything solid and spelled disaster when a wind storm came along the following day.  Debris is knee high along this path…or what WAS a path.  I lost a couple trees in this area too, but the shrubs should all be ok.

I think these trees along my driveway, next to the iris beds will be ok after some major pruning. They didn’t have any heavy limbs falling on them, but branches snapped from heavy ice.  Oh, and did I tell you our power went on and off the first two days, then went out completely for five days.  Amazing how dependent we are on electricity.  At least we stayed warm & were able to cook on our wood stove!

Today the sun came out and the wind stopped blowing, so I decided to tackle this section of my garden because I see it from my studio window every day.  I’m on the Gorge Artists Open Studio Tour again, so need to get my garden sorted out before April!  Maybe if I work on a different section each week I can have it ready in time.  Folks have to walk through my garden to get to my studio so I want it to look as nice as possible.

I have to share something wonderful that happened in the midst of my angst over this disaster in my garden.

I received a phone call from our local nursery, Vanguard, telling me they had something in their office for me & would I mind stopping in when I next came into town.  Well, not one that can hold my curiosity, I dashed into town to see what they had for me!

Someone had phoned in an order to replace my trees!  What??!!  One of my Facebook Friends, anonymously gave me the most amazing gift.  Beyond the trees, my “Facebook Forest Friend” as she/he prefers to be called gave me a sense of wonder.

An overwhelming and amazing gratitude is what I felt when given something valuable and unexpected without anything in return required…not even a ‘thank you note or phone call’…anonymously.  I don’t think these words are quite saying it.  Simply put I was blown away.  And still am!

Back to my clean-up, here’s the ‘after’ photo of the section shown above, with all the debris now raked up.  You can see where I piled the debris in the back left part of this photo, but you can see it better below.

For scale, I had my dog Treasure sit in front.  It’s about 2′ deep x 3′ tall by 8′ wide.  Just from one section!  The larger branches wait for me in the upper sections while my back recovers from today.  Some of those larger branches might be good for next year’s wood stove fires!

I can’t thank you enough, my Facebook Forest Friend!  I’ve been putting my list together and will be ordering my new trees very soon.

Thanks for stopping by and allowing me to share my gardening journey with you.