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"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.
The second best time
is
today." -- African proverb
* I have been interested in trees since I was a little girl. When I planted my
first tree, I couldn't imagine what the little sapling would look like as a mature tree.
* In choosing a tree to plant, I had no idea which trees would be right for the planting spot.
* I have made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot about trees in this process.
Come inside my virtual arboretum and learn with me!
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About the Tree Grower's Diary
by Julie Walton Shaver
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I am a writer, a photographer,
a storyteller . . .
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I grew up in Aiken, South Carolina, under the live oak canopy above South Boundary Street. Aiken
is a hot, humid place in summer. I remember thinking as a very young girl how wonderful it was to have that cooling canopy
over the street. Thus, my love of trees began.
Photograph of live oaks in Aiken, South Carolina,
by Larry Gleason
The Tree Grower's Diary started out as a little white notebook I kept in a drawer in the living
room where I live now, in Metuchen, New Jersey. Each section of the notebook featured a different tree we had planted in our
yard, showing how big the tree was when we planted it. You could lift a picture to see the following year's picture. If
you flipped the pictures really fast, it was like one of those old nickelodeon machines. Dare a visitor to my home ask about
my hobbies. I'd spend an hour flipping through my tree pictures, trying to convince friends and strangers alike that it's
fun to watch trees grow!
Long about 1999, I showed
that notebook to the Webmaster at Coffeedrome, my mentor and good friend. I knew nothing about Web sites then, so he started the online diary, which began as a simple
letter with a few pictures of my trees. As the years went by, I asked the Webmaster to add more pictures, and eventually,
we worked together to redesign the site into a tree-specific, user-friendly resource. People from all over the world check
out my little "notebook" now, usually stopping by while researching types of trees they might be interested in planting
in their own yards.
How it all got started
Before we moved to our new home, we lived in a condo with a Western exposure, no shade, and condo
association rules that forbade the planting of anything taller than a petunia. It was so bright in my living room that I had
to keep the curtains drawn all the time. If only I could have planted a tree for shade! I can't stand to be cooped up
in a windowless house!
So we moved.
Our new house was in an established neighborhood with lots
of tall shade trees. I was in tree heaven. Our yard alone had four good-sized shade trees and a nice flowering dogwood. Within
one year, three of our shade trees were dead. (They were old and I didn't know a thing about trees when we bought the
house. If I had known then what I know now, I would have known all three of those trees were goners. Besides, two of them
were Norway maples, notoriously short-lived trees because of girdling roots. The other, by the way, was a pretty river birch
that bit the dust after an ice storm bent it in half.)
Our yard was suddenly bright and sunny. I wanted shade.
The planting of trees began. I figured I'd forget when I planted them. Thus began the notebook which led to the Tree Grower's
Diary. I've made a lot of mistakes and I've learned a lot about trees since this project began in 1996. Ultimately,
my goal is to help prevent other homeowners from making the same mistakes I did, like planting a bee-attracting purple leaf
plum right next to a tree house! (If the tree's tag had said anything about fruit, I might have realized it wasn't
the right tree for that spot.)
I became interested in photography in my last semester of college. My tree project has allowed me the opportunity to practice on somewhat stationary objects,
learning how to use the features of my cameras so that when I'm faced with photography projects that involve people, I
know what to do -- how to frame subjects, how to balance texture and color, how to position my camera so that the light will
be in the right place. To study my tree site back to 1996 is to notice that my photography has improved a bit. (June 2008:
I am currently shooting with a Nikon D3.)
In 2005 alone, Julie's tree pages on Coffeedrome logged over 120,000 page views!
On April 4, 2006, I decided to take the diary solo and
launched TreeGrower'sDiary.com. My little white notebook has its own Blog now! This is HUGE!
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"Your Tree Grower's Diary pages are amazing. You have logged some serious time
and effort putting these together!"
-- Michael Jaquez,Web Manager,
The National Arbor Day Foundation. (April
8, 2005)
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I started the blog because I wanted to have a regular forum for sharing the little details of my trees.
But my trees are only a small portion of my life, so you never know what might show up next. I share my love
of trees with my husband, Mike, my two young sons, Bradley and Gregory, my neice, Hope, and my cat, Kaptain Karl. My newest
tree is a Dawyck Purple Beech, planted in honor of a majestic Purple European Beech around the corner from my house that was cut down to make room for a house too big for the lot.
By day, I'm a roving photographer (my kids nicknamed me "Mamarazzi"), school, church and community volunteer, choir
singer, tree fanatic and full time mom. I've kept a journal of things my kids say and do since my oldest was 2. I'm sure that
will be fun to look back on when they're old and gray. I am also taking piano lessons which disturbs Kaptain Karl tremendously.
In addition to all this, I actually have a real job, too, as a night editor at a newspaper, commuting into Manhattan five
nights a week. Sometimes my general crabbiness can be explained by the fact that I have been chronically sleep deprived since
1994.
My trees ground me, bring me back to nature, always give me something to look forward to, something to nurture. But the bottom
line is that one day my children will be grown, and I will want to remember what life was like when they were little. Might
as well watch my kids and the trees grow together.
See my original Coffeedrome pages:
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