200 to 1

Bradford Pear in the backyard 

Pre-dawn this morning, I read the following from the book Lab Girl by Hope Jahran: "Plant numbers are staggering: there are 80 billion trees just within the protected forests of the western United States.  The ratio of trees to people in America is well over two hundred."  This was just from her prologue!  I read the remaining pages in the sample and then went to the library's online card catalog and was very excited to see they already have a copy.  I am third on the list.

There was an upsetting tree "trimming" at a store in town.  I had seen trucks and workers there the other day just as they were beginning and I thought they were city trucks.  Not so.  I went in and asked.  The property owner paid someone to do this to the trees. The trees were not in the way of any power lines at all as the utilities are in the space between street and sidewalk.

My guess is that 10-15 feet of tree in full bloom was removed from each of the eight trees.  So sad and so arboristically wrong.  I wish I had a before picture.  These trees are much more rounded than my pear but also do not have any fruit.  They are all over town and looked very similar in size to the trees in front of another building.

Sigh.  The phrase, You Get What You Pay For, comes to mind.