This photo above is one of the last photos I took of the cottonwood trees we had in our back yard.
The tree on the left side of the screen was planted first on Mother's Day in 1995, and it was the bigger of the two trees. The tree on the right was planted about one year later. They were both pretty big trees when we planted them and they grew big very quickly over the years.
We loved that these trees provided us so much shade and privacy but they are messy trees. We even had the "cottonless" version of cottonwood trees, but these trees drop lots of messiness throughout the Spring, Summer and Fall (oh, the Fall... so many, many leaves). These trees were planted so close to our house in the narrowest point of our back yard. We have a wide backyard but the narrowest part of the yard is the spot where we planted these trees.
Behind Sandy and the red lounge chair, you can see some of the biggest cottonwood tree.
It was really big.
A few weeks ago, we had the cottonwood trees removed. It was a big job. It took the tree surgeon and his helper four days to get the job done. After that, Ron and Zach bagged and removed about 55 huge bags of tree debris which primarily came from the stumps being ground down. We thought we might be able to plant a nice pine tree in the space between where the cottonwood trees once stood but the area was so incredibly root bound we couldn't hardly dig down an inch before running into a web of roots. We decided to have a pergola built over the patio to give us some shade and some privacy. The lawn was looking really rough in the spot where the trees were removed and so many other place. We ended up hiring a landscaping company to put in a new lawn and they really did an amazing job. I think our yard looks better than it did nearly 22 years ago. They were able to till up and level the soil. The new sod lawn even covers up roots which were showing around our existing trees. The soil had deteriorated in a number of spots along the fence line and they built the soil up in those area. Our backyard looks so pretty now. We are looking forward to spending more time out there, especially when the pergola gets built later in July.
When Zach got home and saw the new lawn, he asked, "Is it real?"
It kind of looked like "astro-turf" when it first was first put in.
It's raining right now. The lawn is lovin' it!
