The Sad Story of the Beaver Tree

Lars Poulsen - 2021-04-20

In our family language, a "beaver tree" is a tree that has been badly pruned. The name is derived from the company name "Giant Beaver Tree Service" which operates in our area, and sends out little postcard ads in the mail.

Our Neighborhood

We live in an older working class neighborhood. The subdivision was developed in 1951 as affordable starter homes for WW-II veterans. After turning over for two generations of home owners, the original cookie-cutter tract houses have diversified a bit, and the area is now gentrifying, with property values creeping up around a million dollars.

Our House January 2021

A large part of the charm is that in these older neighborhoods, we have a lot of large, old trees, and the City's "Urban Forestry" office protects them fiercely. When we wanted to remove 4 old decorative pear trees in our front yard, which all had advanced infections of fireblight, it took 4 months of negotiations with the street tree committee before we reached a compromise that let us remove 3 of them; the last one is still in the picture above.

The Beaver Tree

One block North of our house, the tree on the left in this picture is one of the Mission Olive trees that are the designated street species for our street.

January 2020

The home owner decided that it needed pruning, so now it looks like this:

After pruning

Part of the prunings, before they were hauled away

(End of page)