The front and back doors are open. A cool 85 degree morning breeze is blowing thru the living room—but not for long. The sun is rising above the trees in the east, and the temperature is climbing quickly as the shade is disappears. We’ll be shutting the doors soon.
The Hummingbirds have been frisky. They like hanging out here, because we have red-blossomed Turk’s Cap and purplish-blossomed Desert Willow. There are Cardinals visiting the water in the back. Wrens are calling from somewhere in the distance. And I saw a Titmouse in the Monterey Oak in the front, hopping from branch to branch, hiding in the green glow of the tree’s leaves.
There has been no benefit to us from tropical storm Lee in the Gulf. People we know in Houston barely got a drop, the deluge in Louisiana notwithstanding. The Pine trees are dying down there from lack of rain.
Here, I’d say Austin is going to lose 10% of our trees. The sad thing is that people seem to think that trees never need help. So as we drive thru the neighborhoods, we can see many homes that have clearly watered their trees at all, and we’ve only had two (brief) rains since last fall. A lot of those trees are going to die.
A neighbor down the street just lost an ancient Live Oak in their front yard. Unlike many other homes, they’ve evidently been watering theirs, although to tell you the truth, it might be that they just water their grass—which is not enough for the trees, as the grass can steal every drop. This week, we go into Stage 3 water restrictions, so we can only water our thirsty trees (heck with the grass) once a week.
Our baby trees are getting a lot of attention. We watch them closely—the Monterey and Lacey Oaks, the Texas Redbud and Persimmon, the Possumhaw. But our Ash trees (the weed trees we’ve always known were going to die “soon”) might be gone before even we imagined, and we’re not ready for that. The Ash in the front protects us from the onslaught of afternoon sun, now that the rental house across the street has completely lost all three of their trees which used to give us shade in the last two hours of the day. And the Ash in the back protects us in the morning. There are Cedar Elms poised to take over from that Ash in the back, but they’re at least 10 years from giving an equivalent duration of shade. So I’ve taken to watering them all—something I never imagined we’d need to do.
And the winds (which is the only effect we got from Lee) have been fierce. Branches are falling out of trees. We’re under a red flag warning. And there are fires again, in Steiner Ranch northwest of Austin and in Bastrop. The fair and industrious Trudy went to the Humane Society late last night, because the entire Bastrop Humane Society was being evacuated due to an approaching fire. A friend of hers approaching Bastrop from Houston last night said the horizon was an inferno.
Looking for the four horsemen.