Green Spaces in Rural Places:

Many years ago, Dennis and I moved up north to become farmers with his parents. Before that, we were both employed at the former Glasgow Air Force base, long before it became St Marie.

We didn't have any clear plans for the move, other than his dad needed him. We certainly had no master plan for our yard. That all happened piecemeal and very haphazardly.

We put in a double-wide mobile home after revamping the well that has been here from the homesteading days. A septic system was also added, a great improvement over the old outhouses. My father-in-law had optimistically thought Opheim might enjoy a little population boom, so he put in enough electrical systems and hookups to the water for four homes. (Some of those had been used by others. One is now our garage, and the farthest one to the south is now a cell tower.)

For the first couple of years I had a yard full of weeds. Our closest neighbor to the south felt I should have shade trees, not just the shelter belts. She had Canadian poplars, also known as cotton-less cottonwoods. They are a softwood tree, very hardy, and relatively fast-growing in this area. She cut off several of the lower branches (the ones that had been whacking her in the face when she mowed), stuck them in dirt in coffee cans with the tops and bottoms cut out, and tied them to her garden shed so the winds wouldn't take them away.

I was so grateful when she presented me with these miniature trees, along with instructions on how to nurture them until they took. Those instructions required digging deep, wide holes, layering pea gravel in the bottom for drainage, and inserting a length of plastic pipe before planting the trees. The pipe insured that the water would come up from underneath, so the roots would go deep. The pea gravel was to keep the roots from drowning.

I trickled water into those pipes daily, on a rotating basis, for a few years. Nowadays those pipes have been crushed by the growth of my shade trees.

They are lovely trees, and I greatly appreciate not having cotton floating about early each summer. The leaves make a nice rustling sound in light winds.

But those trees also came with problems. Being a softwood, they are prone to breakage in the winds that go beyond light breezes. Every time it blows over 20 mph, I have to pick up branches from the lawn before mowing.

They drop LOTS of leaves in the fall (and after hailstorms). Those have to be raked off the lawn and out of my flowerbeds. Quite often those chores aren't completed until the following spring.

And they send up volunteer shoots everywhere. I'm constantly clipping off those shoots. The roots tend to come up through the lawn, high enough for the mower blades to bounce off them. Those roots extend to fantastic lengths, too. I've found volunteer tree shoots coming up in the north end of my raspberry rows, which are a good 90-100 feet from the nearest tree.

Sometimes I think that if I had it all to do over, I might not have accepted those trees. But overall, I do love them. They shade the house well in the summer, reducing the amount of air conditioning we need on those hot days of summer.