I live just outside of a small town, it’s residential but everyone has wooded 2 acre lots. I bought the place a year ago and this spring went on a tree planting campaign to get some more privacy. Things have been hit or miss, turns out I have great soil but deer love to eat my little apple trees and the wind keeps knocking everything down. With deer fencing and metal supports a month later I’m finally on the right track.
Until this morning.
Backing out of my drive way this morning I see a tree on my front lawn missing, the metal supports bent. I walked up and inspected it. Ok, I figure, it’s possible a moronic or rabid deer walked into the lines holding the tree to the stakes and torn my tree out trying to get away. Then I notice another missing too, the ropes untied. So some fucker drove up in the middle of the night and hauled away 2 of my 6’ tall Red Maple trees! No one else would take a tree but a homeowner, so some fuckstick drove by and said to themselves, “those are nice, I should put 2 in my yard, let’s back up and get to work!”
I’m tempted to put a large sign in my front yard: Hey jackass, Red Maple trees are on special at Walmart for $9.50 and they’re in better shape than mine!
They only took 2, I had plenty more so hopefully they have enough now. I wonder if the Arbor Day Foundation handles missing tree cases.
if they were kidnappers then you should get a ransom note soon and be able get your trees back. if you hesitate and they send you an envelope with a leaf in it then you know they’re serious. don’t pay more than $19 in ransom.
I put a fair bit of effort into tree selection, proper planting and proper pruning so I’d be sorely pissed if anyone did that to me as well. It’s not just the cost but the theft of additional effort and value, plus just that some ‘peckerwood’ violated the integrity of your residence.
Can you take pics of the tread patterns his vehicle left on your dirt? Had you done anything to the trees, pruning perhaps, that might enable you to identify them later? I’d be doing a little driving around and surveying myself after work if that happened to me.
The treenapper can sit back over the years proudly watching the maples growing, changing colors, and think … what fine saplings I STOLE from Sitnam’s yard. Who would want to be as low as him/her?
There’s a woman in Minneapolis who’s been filching landscaping plants from homes and garden stores. The police had her image along with her little dog.
Your neighbor is an idiot, seeing as there is a much better way to deter thieves that doesn’t involve permanently disfiguring conifers.
“Cornell Plantations in Ithaca, New York, had trees worth up to $3,000 each cut down and carted away by midnight entrepreneurs . . . until an employee invented a way to make evergreens so ugly (temporarily, of course) that nobody would want to steal them! To make your own batch of “ugly mix,” stir together 20 ounces of hydrated lime (from a building supply store) and 4 ounces of Wilt-Pruf anti-transpirant (available at garden stores) in a nonmetallic bowl. Slowly fold and stir that into two gallons of room-temperature water in an aluminum pan. Mix in two bottles of pink food coloring . . . and spray the dye onto your trees with a garden sprayer. Do this during dry weather; rain gradually washes the coating away.”
