The Ivy and the Willow Tree

This is my willow tree. It sits silently in the corner of our backyard swaying gently when a breeze blows and providing shade on summer days. I love my willow tree.

    When I first saw it I secretly hoped it would come to life and dole out wise advice like the willow tree in Pocahontas. It’s hard to give up on a little girl’s fantasies.

As you can see, my tree is covered in ivy. I fully admit I knew zip about plants and gardening when we made the move to our house so I thought the ivy was a nice perk to an already beautiful tree. Then my astute mother came over and set me straight on the dangers of ivy (maybe I don’t need the tree from Pocahontas after all) She brought me up to speed on the fact that ivy is actually bad and will strangle the tree and eventually kill it. Suddenly I was picturing something from a Stephen King novel; an unstoppable force of ivy that would sneak into my bedroom in the dead of night and strangle me too… My imagination takes on a life of it’s own at times.

  So I got to work pulling and yanking and jerking these ropey buggers out of the ground. After hours of sweaty upper body pain and countless bug bites I got to this point and decided to call it a day.

And what’s a girl to do with all the scary bug filled branches? Pack them into waste bags apparently. This is only five of the never ending bags being filled up around here.

  There was still a ton of vines entwined in the top of the tree but removing the bottoms rooted into the ground kills them off so the plan was to give it a week or so and come back out with a rake to get all the dead brown vines down.

  After a few days of some major heat the vines got what were coming to them. We were good to go.

BUT THEN…..

I saw this! There are a family of baby racoons living up in the tree!!!

         My first thought was, ‘Yikes! Those are vicious right?’ Looking back at this critter who had locked eyes with me and let out an angry GRRR! suddenly my mind went to a very different Disney movie moment:

Run Pumba!

*I think I just called myself a wart-hog*

 

But eventually I realized that these were little babies. Three to be exact. They were cuddled up together in a sleepy ball yawning at my interruption of their snuggle time and probably more scared of me and my incessant clicking camera than I of them.

 Then I thought about my chubby nugget of a cat and how racoons have a reputation of brawling with cats. When my cat is scared she quite often takes on the pose you see above in hopes you will just move on. I may as well bring her out to the racoons on a silver platter with these fighting skills. But alas, she is a strictly indoor kitty, that is, when she doesn’t slip past us and out the door for a few minutes of freedom before we chase her back inside.

 

So I decided they won’t be much threat and I would leave the babies alone in their willow tree home. They are too cute to serve an eviction notice to in the form of a rake. Hopefully they just move on to a new home and our battle with the ivy will continue onto it’s next saga.

 

Stay tuned…

 

*Photo credit Disney and Reckless Bliss*