There's something so satisfying about stumbling through the city and coming upon a grove of trees that look like they haven't been touched for years. If you're a closet lumberjack, it's like heaven. All you have to do is get a job as the gardener and start whacking away. Sleep all night and work all day.
Such is the situation at the Portland Chinese Garden. Magnificent trees that for years have kept their limbs have been turned into timber. A magnolia that used to offer its huge fragrant flowers for people to admire and smell has gone through so many amputations that to smell the flowers a visitor has to be ten feet tall. Pines and larches have been butchered into sticks with tufts of needles on top. The Cat in the Hat and the Sneeches would be quite at home there.
Yes, it's true that there's a whole lot of limbing going on everywhere, not just at the Chinese Garden. It seems that some kind of sickness has taken hold of pruners such that one can't walk down a city street without seeing the wounds inflicted upon our trees by a paranoid corp of "landscapers". Just swing by the Central Library, which used to look like a monastery in the Himalayas, so thick were the rhododendrons around it. Now it looks like the Red Guards have swept through with chainsaws.
Too bad the gardeners at the Chinese Garden aren't secure enough to see that the limbs that trees hold out to humanity shouldn't all be cut off just because every one else is doing it. It's enough that in our war against nature that whole forests have been cut down to assuage our fears. Let's leave the few remaining trees alone, for our sakes as much as for theirs.
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