Death of the Crepe Myrtle

The above is from 2022.
I have been fighting with that Crepe Myrtle all this time.
I like the way the skin/bark looks, the flowers are pretty when blooming, then they fall off and become a mess, then comes the seeds.
The thing was shading my garden, roots from it coming to the water and nutrients were sprouting, so I decided no more!

I started yesterday, but didn't get any before photos, above here was where I started this morning

That single cut yesterday, was the most troublesome and dangerous. My chainsaw blade got bound up in the wood, and nothing I could do helped,
I had to DISMANTLE THE SAW, get the chain and blade separated so I could wiggle the chain, which was a pain (hey I'm a poet)
Then I couldn't exactly remember how to put it back together (I think I had the chain backwards)
BUT... as Ms Scarlotte said in "Gone with the Wind" "Tomorrow is another day"

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So this morning, I began cutting and hauling the debris to the burn pile, and what a day it has been.

Needless to say, one should not attempt this kind of work alone, especially when one has his right knee bandaged and braced

That cut didn't fall quite the way I had hoped//thought it would (¿Wood?) but my head is hard.
Lesson #2 you should never try cutting overhead

That is the one that nearly hit me, or it did hit me, I can't quite remember ha ha ha

That final cut, one lone branch adamantly holding on, was especially dangerous. It was leaning on the corner of the garage roof,
I worked and worked, cutting here, trying to wedge it to make it go the way I wanted, but in the end, I used a piece of rusty pipe to hook on and PULL!!!!

This was all that was holding that last limb, just a few threads of wood grain

That is from the parking pad side

This is the yard side. After I paint the stump ends with round up or spectracide, to be sure the tree is dead, I will trim those even so I can put something on it, perhaps a potted plant? Or a statue?
I saved out quite a few interesting cuts for those purposes as well

Then tomorrow, if I survive the soreness tonight, I still have a bunch or brush tops to cut and take to the burn pile..
His Majesty supervised all this from a safe distance, pretending to be some orange bird in a tree

"Death of a Crepe Myrtle"

^by
Jerry E Smith
©3/13/2024
All images taken by me
Using my Samsung S22 Ultra cellphone

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