By Steve Chamberlain
Contributing Writer
Saturday, Aug. 13, brought unexpected wind damage to parts of Central New York, including my garden. My wife and I had spent the day driving over to the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown to see the early Ansel Adams photographs (highly recommended). It was a clear day over and back. We went to dinner locally, during which there was a brief downpour. In early evening, as we were sitting watching a British detective series on DVD, a thunderstorm arrived and the lights went out twice, but only for a minute or two each. We finished our DVD and went to bed.
At 6 a.m. the next morning, I walked out onto the front porch to get the Sunday paper and found a big surprise! Another 15 feet of our very large spruce in front of the house had been torn apart and large branches had come down next to the house destroying part of my deer fence and crushing lots of plants (which will survive). It just figures, I thought. A whole week with no deer had just passed and I was beginning to believe we’d finally patched all the entry points. Nature didn’t agree.
Sunday is gardening day, so my assistant and I surveyed the property. Six trees had lost major pieces. A huge sugar maple had broken up and fallen into the adjacent cemetery, breaking down another section of deer fence. Two black locusts (one the cultivar Frisia) had broken off about 20 feet off the ground. A large piece of a very large black locust had broken off and landed on my granite bench (which was up to the task of ignoring it). A second large piece of a different black locust has broken off and fallen straight down in my neighbor’s back woods, where it was leaning precariously against a tulip tree and waiting to fall on her clothesline and garage during the next strong wind.
From all this I concluded that there had been little or no wind at ground level, but a sharp gradient about 20 feet above the ground. This is pretty much the same pattern of what happened here in the infamous Labor Day storm in 1998.
As we were trying to get our heads around how to clean up this mess, my favorite tree service, based in Jamesville, pulled up unbidden to ask if I needed help. It was the reverse of “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” They were able to begin within the hour and a crew of four with a cherry picker and claw debris collector made short work of the spruce mess. It now looks like a fuzzy mushroom. They also climbed the tulip tree in the neighbor’s yard and took down the “new black locust tree” that wasn’t connected at the bottom. We cleaned up the rest. As I write, the cemetery crews are still working on the sugar maple debris.
In the aftermath, I have to decide what to do about what’s left. The spruce was damaged during the Labor Day storm, but had grown a new leader and is healthy. I’m going to try giving it yet another chance. Otherwise, I end up with a bare circle 50 feet or more in diameter with huge roots sticking out of the ground. I don’t really want a bed there, and the work to make it flat enough to mow would be really expensive. So long as you don’t look up, it still looks fine!
The yellow-leafed black locust (Frisia) still had a big vertical branch that ought to prosper so long as we don’t have a repeat of this craziness anytime soon. The two very large black locusts that lost big pieces hardly look changed, so they should be fine. The one that completely broke off is now a trimmed-up vertical/slanted garden feature. Locust rots very slowly, so this can join the nearby logs of locust trees uprooted in 1998. For the sugar maple, we’ll just install a new run of fence across the corner rather than trying to deal with the broken-up trunk.
All I really need to do is wait until next season for some of the perennials in the earth to start over and look better. Not all that bad an outcome. We were lucky!
