Denver Direct: Walkabout – December 21, 2012


Friday, December 21, 2012

Walkabout – December 21, 2012

by Gerald Trumbule
It’s a cloudy overcast day today – perfect for a walkabout in my neighborhood near City Park on York.
I’ve got this thing about giant old trees in the neighborhood. As much as I love trees, I think these old giants should be removed and replaced with trees that are more in keeping with the scale of the architecture they are near. I’ve had 4 of them cut down on this block on properties I owned (at an average cost of $1000 each) and then replanted with 5 small trees that will only grow about 35 feet tall, which is in keeping with the height of the buildings. I contacted the Denver Forest and Trees Department about this some years ago and they told me they don’t cut trees down because they are ugly or out of scale. A few years later, I read that the Curtis Park neighborhood got a grant for exactly that purpose. 

The condo project at 17th and Gaylord got finished. It looks like they redid the balconies. Must have cost a boatload of money…

but they look much better.

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  1. Anonymous12:54 PM

    your comments about the trees reminds of a common saying about plastic surgery,i.e., "some people have more money than sense"

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  2. George Seaton9:35 AM

    Ah, Gerald...
    “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow." Herman Hesse

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