Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2013/11/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]We bought a house in Palo Alto for $29,000 (hate us) around 1965. I think the house was built around 1922, and the fig tree in the back yard was probably equally old. We got beautiful white figs from it, that is, the ones the birds left us. The only really smart financial thing we ever did was not to sell the house when we relocated to England for a few years?-turned out to be eight years?but rented it. Our first tenants complained that the tree trunk looked kind of rotted, they had a young child, and were afraid the tree might come down. Asked for permission to chop it down. Permission granted. When we returned to our house, we found that the stump of the tree was very much alive and was sprouting some branches. Eventually, it became a new tree. Because of language difficultiesI? assume that?-our gardener chopped down the tree when he had actually been asked to prune it. I wanted to kill him. Ultimately, following his advice, we let it sprout new shoots, picked the best one to be the new tree trunk, and severed the others. In time we even got a few figs out of the tree. Then, this year, the gardener and my wife concluded that it needed to be nicely shaped by further pruning. This so discouraged the tree that it produced nary a fig. I guess those two decided that form was more important than function. I have hopes for next year. http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1003465.jpg.html Herbert Kanner kanner at acm.org 650-326-8204 Question authority and the authorities will question you.