dead and gone

You may remember these beautiful trees we had planted in our backyard last year: the flowering pear tree last spring and the Colorado Blue Spruce in the fall.

Sadly, they were laid to rest yesterday (okay they had actually both been dead for a LONG time). We received official notice on Tuesday when a gardener came to inspect (although the red needles on the pine and the fact that our pear tree was the only one not blooming in Omaha were pretty good signs to us). We weren’t honestly all that sad about the pear tree because we decided earlier on we should have went with a tree that would get bigger (the one we had was rather streamlined and didn’t provide a whole lot of privacy). I was sad about the pine tree – although I really like our new one:

Luckily, Lanoha’s has a two-year guarantee on all of their trees, so Thursday night we picked out some new ones. They actually recommended we go with a more water tolerant tree in the back corner because the pear tree actually drowned to death. So, we went with a river birch (they had them on sale, so for about the same price as the pear tree, we got a river birch that is almost bigger than our maple – probably 25-30 feet tall). We also got a concolor fir because we couldn’t find any of the streamlined pines that we like. It is a little smaller but is really pretty (it has a blueish-green hue). It actually is about eight feel tall but looks about two feet tall because the other two are so big. The trees were already planted yesterday and we LOVE them! Too bad it has been raining since, so the only photos I have are through our windows. We are excited to see how everything looks once the leaves fully appear!