The joy of trees.

High on my wish list while house hunting was a yard with mature trees. I got my wish. Today we finally had a nice day, so we took the opportunity to work on pruning the trees for a couple of hours before heading out to Arts on the Square and the Taste of Bloomington later today.

Earlier this week we had a couple of spectacular storms move through on successive nights, each with tornado warnings and high winds. We lost a couple of limbs and even a small tree, but at least it left us this beautiful orange sky:


It was not only storm damage that we wanted to tackle, though. We had noticed a lot of dead limbs on the trees, and one tree was situated near the corner of our corner lot, with some lower branches making it hard for people turning out of our street onto the main road to see oncoming traffic, which does not have to stop. So we gave some attention to no less than seven trees, resulting in the following pile:


We finished up with a conifer that I have yet to identify on the southeast corner of the sunroom, which had a lot of dead branches. I forgot to get a good before picture. It's the tree on the left in the photo below; those dead branches extended all the way around the tree from the ground to about shoulder height.


Afterward, I think we have a much prettier tree!


Now I have space to plant something nice underneath.