Plant News

Well, my parents are here for a visit from Texas, and we've been introducing them to interesting California things. Naturally, one of the most prevalent categories of Interesting California Things is the Plant Category. For example, anytime you can walk into your backyard and find limes growing, that's very interesting to those of us not originally from here.

As a side note, did any of you readers out there know that lime trees have thorns? Yes, it's true. So do lemon trees, I hear, along with some orange trees. Jason discovered this all on his own last week in our own backyard. For some reason, it just doesn't seem right for citrus trees to have thorns. Limes and lemons are just so - sunny

In other horticulture news, I wanted to post some pictures today of our olive trees. We have two olive trees in our front yard, and both are on little yard hills, so I like to say that we have our own Mount of Olives in our front yard. Unfortunately (in my opinion), these trees have been trimmed into these little pom pom ball shapes, which is really not my favorite olive tree- trimming formation.

See, here is an untrimmed tree, as God intended it to be (taken of a neighbor's tree on a drive-by photographic shooting yesterday):

Here is a picture of our trimmed tree. This tree has kept the pom pom shapes fairly well, although I suspect that this is because the tree is looking a little brown and is not growing as it should be.

However, trees that do grow well soon grow out of the pom pom shape, developing into what I like to refer to as a "bad hair day" tree.


The bad news is that once you trim your trees like this, you can never go back to natural tree formation, kind of like shaving one's legs, I suppose (as in: once you start, you're doomed, you can't go back, and you have to keep doing it forever). To restore the tree back to it's natural shape you have to cut off all the branches and let it reform itself from scratch.

I am considering this option, although it does seem a little harsh. It might be worth it, though. While I'm considering, we'll just have trees that look slightly shocked and aghast all the time, with their tree hairs standing straight up.

I suppose the good news it that our yard looks like most of the other yards in the neighborhood, since most people around us go for the pom pom olive trees. So now they all look similar to ours - untrimmed.

Like like keeping up with the Joneses, in a shocked tree kind of way.