A friend and I rented a chainsaw and went about playing lumberjack. Well, to make a long story short, the tree ended up coming down in the exact opposite direction in which we had planned. It s perfectly understandable if your initial response as a new homeowner is to scrape everything down to bare earth and start over from scratch just the way you want it. This is especially true when it comes to trees. And I m not writing this warning about trees just because that first tree I cut down nearly did in the garage.
Trees really do establish the foundation of a garden.
New gardens with little twigs as 5-gallon trees will take years to grow into anything substantial. Unless you want to pay hundreds of dollars for a boxed tree from a specimen nursery, be careful about haphazardly cutting down trees. That huge fruitless mulberry, despite it s faults, would have provided some welcome shade in the summer. It would have been better to have simply pruned and shaped that tree and kept it at least until a replacement would have grown to a satisfactory size. Even if you re not sure about a particular tree or plant, give it a little time to grow on you.