Our Olde House: November 6, 2021
Mississippi has a lot of trees. I love trees. Miss Sherry has a few oak trees and probably the largest black walnut tree in Mississippi in her yard. A very large pin oak on the property line was dropping some pretty big limbs a couple of years ago for no apparent reason. The tree is away from our house so we did not have any roof damage from falling branches.
When I first arrived in Mississippi I used to tease Ms. Sherry about her never having seen a ‘real’ tree, and by saying that I meant a Sequoia Redwood. I told her there were lots of them twenty feet in diameter at the ground and over ten feet in diameter two hundred feet up, I even showed her some pictures but she did not seem impressed. The largest ones are thirty-five feet in diameter, still no big deal to her.
I realized that these trees are unbelievably huge and that they cannot be comprehended by description or even a two dimensional picture, so a few years ago we went to California to see the trees and my family. And to have some tortellini and Mexican food, but I digress. We drove up to Yosemite Park and stopped at the first Sequoia grove, which is just inside the park. When she walked up to a twenty footer she stopped and stared straight up for a long time. I eventually told her to touch it; the bark is at least four inches thick, fireproof, and soft to the touch.
We drove to Sequoia Park on another day to see the biggest of the big trees. All of the largest trees have names, and the largest tree in the world by volume is the General Sherman tree, more than thirty-five feet in diameter and over two hundred feet tall, being shortened by several lightning strikes over the past two thousand years, or so. You cannot avoid being stunned and impressed in their presence, and probably asking “What was God thinking when He made these?” I do not know, but it was a good thought.
Back in our backyard I was eventually inspired to walk down to the oak tree for a closer look to see maybe why it was losing limbs. Well, on the side of the tree away from the house there was a hollow place in the trunk maybe eight feet high. It did not look too wide but we decided that we should have the tree removed so it could not fall on anyone or anything.
We had the tree guys leave the stump so Ms. Sherry could plant stuff in it since it is about three and a half feet in diameter. When I saw the stump I could see that the solid tree layer around the perimeter of the stump was about six inches wide; only God knows, literally, how that thin veneer of oak continued to hold up a seventy foot tree, but I appreciate the feat.
There are some very large pecan trees next door and across the street, maybe seventy or eighty feet high and truly magnificent. I had a pecan tree in my yard in California, but it is a different kind than here; I thought it was large at maybe fifty feet tall and almost round like a cartoon tree, but it pales in comparison to the pecan trees here. It looked exactly like the black walnut trees there, also different than our black walnut tree here, except the pecans were oblong and the black walnuts were round.
The squirrels in California ate the pecans while they were very green, and spit the shell bits on the roof and ground; charming. Rarely did a pecan ever hit the ground. It is true, that only
God can make a tree, and He sure has some outstanding examples scattered around this great Country of ours.
