Octobuary 31st – Our Nightmare Before Christmas Moment

Our freak October Nor’Easter didn’t fail to deliver. Over the weekend, we received its full-force, which left us here in central Massachusetts with over a foot of heavy snow, and no electricity until this afternoon ( many areas we are being told will not get their electricity back until the end of the week). So we consider ourselves lucky.

The garden survived the storm better than I first thought that it would. We did have a few disastrous tree incidents, one hit the house, with minor damage to the roof, another large Ash hit the pheasant coop and flight cage – pheasants are now lost all over the neighborhood, we half of our magnolia’s, particularly the yellow one near the greenhouse ( see below) but that Japanese Maples proved to be more flexible than I thought, and most have bounced back to shape.

This is what I woke up to this morning. My Tall and elegant Magnolia ‘Gold Finch”, now a victim of a historic, October snowstorm. Salvageable, but shorter.

Want to avoid damage like this? Plant native species, most  have already lost their leaves. But the Norway Maple is late in deciding to change color. So over planted in the Eastern US it is perhaps America’s “Golden Lab’ of trees? Over bred, omnipresent,  and prone to illness.

On Saturday night, we were kept awake by the loud craaaak of branches and trees in the neighborhood collapsing under the weight of the snow, but today, while walking through the neighborhood, I could see that 99% of the damage happened to imported species of trees, those that have been imported from forests where there are never heavy wet snows.  Our New England trees are designed for such events. In my own yard, I could see that many of the native species survived quite well. Sure, a few White Pines lost branches, and an old dead Ask tree fell, but a majority of our native forest trees are already set for winter – heck, they even have lost their leaves. Trees from China like Magnolia, Davidia, and once widely plants and now invasive European species like English Oaks and  Norway Maples proved that they could not deal with this heavy snow.  Look at the above photo of our neighbors large Norway Maple ( that still has its green, summer foliage) and the below image of our native river birch in our yard, a tree dug from the woodland. The birch has already lost its leaves, but the imported species are in full green leaf.