General Chat

Rose... I had to Google.
I don't know the current situation, but found this.

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/medway/news/future-uncertain-for-iconic-tree-39699/

Wish I had looked around more, when I visited Rochester Cathedral recently to see the huge black oak table they have at the moment.

Perhaps she has a thing for firemen ;-) :-D

JoonieCloonie, when I lived in Kent we used to go often to Rochester, outside the Cathedral there grew a Catalpa tree that was ( is I hope, still there) 140/150 years old. We always stopped to admire it.

I do wish I had more land to plant trees.

I was a very good girl, I'll have you know! No. Minus 2 and I barely touched that night (but yes: good or unadventurous?) ... although at some point not too long after we set up house together. :-)

You don't have to be reeaaally adventurous to squeeze yr bum into a swing. :-D

Look after your trees for sure! Where I am now, it's the native soft maples that used to line the streets that are disappearing. There's a clump of 3 in our back yard that has to go. I've seen two neighbours directly across the street and down a bit take their front lawn trees down, which really annoyed me until I saw what the insides looked like. A foot and a half diameter, completely hollow. That's what my clump, which is very tall but completely wrongly grown and losing branches every storm, will look like.

The other one that was lost since we moved here 8 years ago (look of shock on my face, 8 years) got murdered by lightning. I happened to have gone out on the veranda at about 5 a.m. to enjoy the storm. I love storms. This one was moving west to east, immediately south of us, the direction the veranda faces. I was standing at the top of the steps taking it in ... when came a mighty thunder clap with a simultaneous explosion of lightning. I leapt backward and decided discretion was the better part of ... adventurousness. I found out later that that would have been what took the tree in the neighbours facing's back yard. Fortunately, it only hit next door's fence.

We do live in a bit of a tornado alley, but none in the immediate vicinity so far!

I have three young catalpas stuck in the ground last year and waiting to move to their forever homes, if I can figure out where that will be. They grow mighty fast. We can't have boulevard trees because we're on the power line side of the street, and the front garden is only a few feet to the sidewalk, and we already have a big very old crabapple at the side. I left catalpas behind when we moved cities, and I can't wait to get them growing here. Another couple of years til they flower, but they grow several feet a year.

JoonieCloonie I was a good girl ;-) ( or maybe just unadventurous?) I was also a lot smaller than some of these girls, they are much taller and a bit chunkier than I was at their age.

A shame about the Elms, we had a small Ash tree which had to go a couple of
years ago because of Ash die-back, but the ones between our fence and the play park seem to have recovered. My tree climbing days are over but I did used to do that :-)

You never did that as a teenaged girl? I surely did. ;-)

I can see them now. The wooden swing seats were coated in decades of dark yellow paint, flat bottoms with slatted sides and back, so they were like little cubes with the front and top open. Oh, there was some sort of up-and-down slidey part at the front so a little kid could be confined in the seat. At a park where our family often went, huge area of grass and trees, river running through, a cememt water pool feature enclosed in a hedge, where ... hm ... No. -2 and I slept out one night years later. A playground area with sandboxes, swings, and an enormous elm you could climb a ways up. Gone now; Dutch Elm disease got them all.

I never got actually stuck, but it was a tight squeeze.

She's out and at least the swing is still intact this time.

:-D :-D : :-D

as a teenage girl stuck in a swing. That may not be the saying, but for the second time in as many weeks a girl ( not the same one surely?) is stuck in the children's play park swing meant for toddlers.

Fire brigade are here again as this one may have to be cut out like the last girl was.
:-S

Do they not teach teenagers that you can't fit a gallon in a pint pot? ;-)