I've been laid-up for the last few months - stroke #4 if you can believe it. Now I'm even more challenged than before. It seems to have impacted the essential interior muscles and bodily processes that make most natural and normal processes possible more than anything else. I can still get some external help from the limbs on my left side....and my brain - while full of holes blown through it by the multitude of strokes I've had without knowledge of them - it seems to be at least partly intact.
That's both a blessing and a curse. The damned thing always wants to be exercised and continually searches for something it thinks is worthwhile to focus on.....besides itself that is. However, it generally only wants light duty workouts and accordingly always avoids crossword-puzzles, number games, riddles, and anything requiring much mental equity.
Anyway, I'm back to abusing the tip of my left index finger on this keyboard as I slowly hunt-and-peck for words that no longer can be spoken clearly enough even for Dragon, my expensive-but-now-useless VR program to transcribe them. And I am focused on what I consider "a worthwhile project:" The Study of a Local Group of Douglas Fir Trees.
Close-up of #4 showing both the gnarly texture of a not-so-young tree's bark, but still young-looking in spots. (See especially the upper third of this photo for younger, blister-like bark.)
Today I'd like to focus on FIR TREE #4 in my backyard. (I wrote about getting underway with the Fir Tree project a couple posts ago, and then other events took over.) #4 is one of the largest of the trees and is beautifully situated on one side of a lovely Japanese Maple.(#5 is just 12 feet or so further away.)
It is a very tall tree, but not that much taller than many of the younger trees around it. I think it may be old enough that it has begun bulking up in the trunk faster than it stacks on new sections of vertical growth. It generally has that gnarly rough textured bark characteristic of Old Timers, although it also has some bark with a younger look mixed in (see photo above) a rough indication of where it is age-wise.
I would take an educated guess of its age being around 125-150 years old, no older. That makes it "mature" for sure; but it isn't "old growth" by any stretch of the imagination.
This area of the state was logged off to the veritable bone by the turn of the last Century, and there are still a couple cedar artifacts left in the yard from that time:
An artifact of a less mindful time, this 3 feet-high cedar stump core is all that is left of a giant.
We are a stone's throw from the Capital State Forest, and by the very early 1920s our property was probably part of a privately owned forest-land. The trees maybe were a little less ruthlessly treated than they might have been otherwise; still, this acreage appears to have been harvested around that time. Hence, most of the other big fir trees on the property or in the neighborhood are just a little over 100-125 years old. #4 is one of the exceptions, and one of the more handsome I might add.