My Tree is Dead

 I killed my tree today.

My hardy Eucalyptus, with its cut foliage for flower arranging and its wood production for firewood, biomass and paper production. Its seed was sourced from the cold and high altitude areas of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. And I killed it today. Not myself, of course; I didn’t have the backbone for that.

So I took out a contract. I paid a man to perform the hit and he took the sanction, for a measly £280. I tried to be all Michael Corleone about it – Michael had no qualms, he had no remorse. I failed.

I thought I might identify more readily with the hunch-backed jester who bought the assassin Spartafucile to slay the Duke of Mantua. But Rigoletto lost his daughter Gilda instead, and frankly, he wanted the Duke dead anyway - his assassin botched the job, that’s all.

No, that wasn’t me either. I didn’t want to terminate the tree, I was only following orders. It had grown insanely out of control and thought to have been commanding its roots from a neighbouring garden. Perhaps I was more Captain Willard sent to terminate the command of a renegade Colonel; with extreme prejudice, although I knew I was really nothing but a grocery clerk, sent to collect a bill. So I hired a mechanic.

The assassins arrived at 9:35 this morning, much earlier than arranged, armed with their chainsaws, their green waste shredders, their wood chippers, their stump grinders and their brooms. Two hours and a lethal injection of Glyphosate later, it was dead. The blowers and the brooms hid the evidence and their final solution left no trace.

When I bought it from the nursery 12 years ago, I was told it would only grow to 20 feet. 7 metres, I thought, that’s okay. They lied. Twelve years later it was four times that height and the roots were lifting the neighbours’ fences, tempers frayed and feelings ran high. I had already deflected some of the over-the-fence criticism by pruning it myself one summer but it only grew bigger, stronger and thicker till it blocked out the sun in the south western sky.

Anyway, the deed is done now and I'm overwhelmed by sorrow. I planted a tree in ’83 and I've planted many more since, but it is haunting me that the tree I bought with my Gran's inheritance will host no more nesting doves. Never again will it cast a spooky shadow by a harvest moon, or tune the wind through its branches.

The wind is driving the rain through the back garden tonight, as I write, but not through my tree.

And I miss it.