Recent tree pictures...

...and one ex-tree. These are photos I took over the last two weeks.

As you know if you follow Walt's blog, we had the 75-foot-tall cedar tree on the north side of our house taken down about two weeks ago. It had been dying for two or three years, and we were worried it might fall on the house. We had a big wind storm just a couple of days ago and we were glad the sick tree wasn't a danger any more. The photo above shows what this part of the yard looks like now.

The first step in felling the cedar was to cut off all of its long horizontal branches (photo on the right). That didn't take long. The very top of the tree wasn't hard to cut off and pull down into the yard after that. The coucou birds that have roosted in the top of the tree for decades, cuckooing like crazy, will be disappointed and disoriented when they come back to Saint-Aignan from Africa this spring.

The photos here show how big and tall the trunk of the cedar was. The stump is more than three feet in diameter. That's just two-thirds of its height you see in the photo below. We're thinking we might soon have a cherry tree planted to replace the cedar. A big potted plant will look good sitting on the stump in the meantime.

Below is a recent sunrise seen from our front terrace. The house across the street is owned by some people from Blois and isn't much occupied at this time of year. The same is true of three of the four houses closest to ours. Why? Well, we're expecting a lot of rain over the next four or five days. It's been a very rainy winter.