We bought our fixer upper nearly four years ago -- a brown bungalow on a 3/4 acre lot surrounded by a six foot high lilac hedge and 80 towering black poplars. It wasn't quite the country acreage we were looking for, but it was as much land as we could afford within driving distance of the city. And when you stepped inside the leafy perimeter, the outside world slipped away.
The poplars were intimidating, to say the least. Reaching nearly 70 feet in height, they formed a massive green canopy that stretched over the house and yard. With help from the hedge, they provided a haven for wildlife -- birds, jackrabbits, squirrels and, more often than not, deer. In this way, they brought life to our yard.
But they also stripped it away. The poplars sucked up all the water and nutrients from the soil and blocked out the sun. Other trees in the yard -- apple, cedar and blue spruce -- grew stunted and lopsided. We planted flowers and a vegetable garden, but nothing grew in the perpetual shade.
Then, shortly after we moved in, a plough wind struck our town in the dead of night. I hid the kids in the basement while my husband stood at the window and watched the yard explode. When the worst was over, we aimed a dying flashlight into the dark, trying to assess the damage. The power was out. The rain was still falling. We had to wait until sunrise to see the full impact. And this is what we saw.
Fortunately, although there were hundreds of fallen branches, only two trees had broken at the trunks and fallen, and neither landed on the house. Our neighbour across the street didn't fair as well, waking to find a row of poplars crushing the roof of her garage. She wasn't alone. The community's social media page filled with pictures of the storm, trees fallen on homes and vehicles, overturned campers and broken fences, and dozens of people asking, "Has anyone seen our trampoline?" Or "Whose trampoline is this?"
Throughout the course of the day, several other neighbours stopped by to see how we were making out, despite having their own messes to clean up. Most confided that they were surprised to see our house still standing, which really drove home how lucky we had been.
We spent the next two days piling branches -- many the size of small trees -- repeatedly filling our half-ton and trailer, hauling load after load to the town tree dump. As we slowly put our yard back together, one fact became increasingly clear. The poplars had to go.
In the wild, black poplars can live 200 years. In an urban setting, the lifespan averages 30 to 40 years. Ours had already reached that limit. Initially, we planned to take down a few at a time, starting with the least healthy. We hoped that slowly replacing the poplars with new, different varieties of trees would enable us to maintain our yard's park-like feel. But poplars have an expansive, interconnected root system. We soon discovered that killing one tree caused the trees next in line to die, leaving us with little choice but to take all 80 trees down in a short period of time.
One year and thousands of dollars later, the trees were gone.
There are days when I still miss the sound of the poplar leaves whispering in the wind. But now new things have an opportunity to grow. The apple trees and blue spruce are thriving. We planted a new cedar hedge. And slowly, even the deer have returned.
We may not have the poplars anymore. But we have 3/4 of an acre that is largely a blank slate, and we have big plans for the future.