Barmy Blue's Bland Blog

I’ve just lost a family member. You’ll laugh when I tell you it’s a tree. Allow me to elaborate.

I’m 29 years old.
My parents got married 10 years before I was born.
They held off getting married until they’d bought a house, then the wedding was a bit rushed (this is most likely due to the fact that my dad grew up in some abysmal council houses with his brothers and his mother who had a nervous breakdown (or something to that effect) and ended up going practically blind in her old age which is not good when you have little to no natural light, the lights you do have are only half as bright as they should be and there are numerous holes in the floor. Or so I’m told at least.) and my mum also lived in council houses with her parents, two sisters and brother.
But it was the 60’s/70’s so standards were not always ideal. Usually you got married and had a council house (and I use the word house very loosely here) had a couple of kids and maybe saved enough for a house or were given the option of buying your council house. It all depended. So it makes sense that my parents didn’t want to get stuck in that rut. Although, if they’d gone the council house way I might not have been an only child but never mind all that now.

The house needed a lot of doing up and I mean a lot.
Quite early on my mum got a shrub and planted it at the end of the garden with my Granddad and Uncle. Mum thinks it was when her family first came over to see the house but her memory’s not that great. We’re not clear on whether my dad was there or not. He claims he was but mum’s not so sure. Anyway. It’s just a little shrub. A Christmas tree. A spruce I’m guessing, judging by how spikey he is. He’s always been referred to as my mum’s Christmas Tree.
It’s safe to assume that he must have been a year or two old at least to have been sold. It’s not like we grew him from a seed or anything. So I place his age as being around 40.
For as long as I’ve existed that tree has towered over our garden. For 40 you’d think he’d be bigger than the house but no, he’s just a bit shorter. Well. He was.
Every time we have a storm I’ve worried about the tree falling over and hitting the house, he’s big enough that he’d surely hit the kitchen and possibly my room but oddly still preferable to him falling over several gardens because then we’d have to deal with the neighbours.

We got a letter from someone representing our neighbour a couple of months ago advising that we cut back our garden (particularly not let the Christmas Tree get any bigger) because it could damage her foundations. Apparently she wants an extension. Ha.hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahah ah. DREAM ON. And they think they have a foundation problem. You should see the cracks in our walls. My dad had to fix our foundations 10-15 years ago. Our other neighbour had some massive evergreens that messed us up real good. Apparently my dad poisoned them but they still grew super big. Eventually we had a storm and they fell down across three gardens (not ours, we’re not that kind of neighbour. We neighbour all three gardens). Those trees presence killed various plants of ours. Apparently my mum’s lavender and possibly a damson tree. I’ve heard mixed accounts of it. It either died anyway, died because the evergreens took all the light or died when my dad tried to poison the evergreens. I always just knew it as the dead tree. The highlight of its afterlife was the one time I saw a woodpecker on it. It’s super amazing and rare because we don’t have woodpeckers here. They’re common in the countryside but not here.

So. Back to this letter. Now and then my mum’s been steadily hacking away at the garden bit by bit to clear things on the side with the neighbour who sent us the letter. I’m not too happy about it. At least make it even and do a little of the other side too if you’re going to do it. Our garden’s been overgrown for a very long time so we made some discoveries.
Our neighbour had a new fence put in a few years ago. Right by the kitchen is a raised bed with a wall that I used to sit in when I was little. Had a green bush-like thing with little white flowers no idea what it was. That area is the only place that bluebells grow in our garden. They steadily migrated from the very back of the garden all the way down the side to that one spot. I’ve tried to plant some elsewhere but they just haven’t taken.
We used to have a little picket fence but our garden being so overgrown and the fence being so old it couldn’t stop our garden encroaching on hers so I understood and respected her choice to put in a new fence. It’s a high fence that I actually like, since it shuts out therest of the world. As a child such a fence would have been surprising to me. But now I’m as reclusive as a snow leopard I like it. What I don’t like is that when the concrete fence posts were put in to support it someone has clearly broken the end of the wall to insert the post and just dumped the bricks in our garden, hoping we wouldn’t notice. We didn’t, until now. Hateful *****.
I shouldn’t be mad about it but I’m still vexed from a similar incident from earlier. Or maybe later, not sure which was first now. But anyway. One of our neighbours on the other side had their garden done up. To be fair I don’t think they own it, I think they must be renting so the owner did it up but I hate them anyway so I’ll blame them. They’re so incredibly loud, they have their back doors wide open and blare terrible music and you’re lucky to go three weeks without them arguing, the woman’s the worst, she’s so loud.
Anyway. They had their garden done up. Don’t know if they got someone in to do it or not. But they put up a new fence, the old one was broken so fair enough. Or so I thought. Until I went to feed the birds one day and noticed everything was leaning a little more than usual. No surprise since someone had dumped a couple of nice fresh paving slabs only just on our side of the fence, clearly before the fence was erected. Not just that but also a dead tree trunk and a laundry bag (well a heavy duty bag the kind of which I associate with laundry) some rubbish has also ended up in that area. In fairness it could be foxes. We have a few. But I very much doubt it.

At the moment I’m not really sure how I feel. I loved that old tree so much just for existing but never actually did anything to maintain it. He just seemed content without us. I’m sad that this towering figure from my childhood is no more but it’s not my usual sad feeling. It’s kind of hollow inside.
We didn’t notice anything yesterday. I remember looking at him. He looked closer to the house since mum had cleared some of the stuff around him. Maybe it wasn’t an optical illusion. Maybe he was leaning. Looking straight up I didn’t notice anything odd but maybe if I could have seen him from a different angle I’d have noticed him leaning. He’s an evergreen so he should have had strong roots. My dad tells me that’s why evergreens are such a pain, because their roots spread too far and mess with foundations. It was raining all day but not very windy. I didn’t hear anything. Mum thought she heard something falling in the bathroom and thinks that might have been the tree. But we were out for a while yesterday and it was dark when we got back so he might have fallen then. We just don’t know. My mum came in this morning and told me the tree had fallen over. I can’t see him from my room anymore, well, just the very top, since there’s another tree that’s sprung up right next to the house. We have to kill that one because it’s too close. I meant to do it last year bust I just can’t bring myself to kill a tree, even though we didn’t want that one, it just sprang up. I just can’t willingly kill it. It’s a beautiful nuisance.
I jumped out of bed and had to go down to the kitchen to see. Our beautiful old Christmas tree has fallen over but we can’t see where or what the damage was until we clear the stuff around it. I don’t know if the trunk snapped or if he’s uprooted. I should have cleared everything away today but it was raining and I had no energy. I think the overgrowth of other stuff cushioned his fall and maybe helped silence it. He looks so sad just lying there on the floor.

When talk of possible removal of that tree came up I’d researched some things. The internet told me that it is possible to grow an evergreen form a cutting so it’s possible. But we need a branch young enough and to graft it to a sapling of the same root structure (apparently a genetic relative preferably) and since he’s 40 years old from a garden centre I doubt we can find a young sibling to stick him onto. After that it’ll take several years of care just to get him to shrub size. We don’t have the expertise.
I stayed awake thinking about it. We could do this or that. Maybe he can be fixed. We could find and expert. Did someone do this deliberately. Was he poisoned. I know people do that because my dad did it to another tree, not a hint of guilt for trying to poison a living thing.
I took me ages to get to sleep and ages to get up. I still feel tired, even though I stayed in bed far longer than I should. I know it’s stupid but I just didn’t want to get up. It felt like if I didn’t get up then it hadn’t happened and I didn’t have to deal with it. I don’t know if I’m feeling sad but empty because it’s just a tree in the end, because I’ve been expecting it for several years or if this is just another level of depression.
Currently I’m lethargic, disinterested in pretty much everything and took about 4 hours, after finally getting up 3 hours late, to actually eat anything despite the fact that I’d been hunger for maybe 6 hours or so but got to that level of hunger where you don’t really think about it and you don’t have stomack ache, your stomach just feels a little tight but that’s all. Not sure if that was depression of just my blood sugar levelling out though.
You know when you’re hungry so your stomach growls but you leave it a while and it stops and you feel fine for a while. Apparently that’s something to do with your blood sugar levels and is not your stomach trying to eat itself.

I’ve been rambling.
I don’t suppose anyone here knows for sure if I can save our tree. It depends on various things.