conuly

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and I do know I've been speaking of birds a lot! - we have in front of the house some sort of evergreen tree. Nobody really likes it, we have no idea how to prune it so it's all shaggy in the worst way, and honestly I think we've all thought about getting rid of it... but the sparrows love that tree and have loved it as long as we've been here. You can hear them chattering up a storm all morning and into the afternoon, loud enough to wake the dead. And we also all like the birdsong, even if we're not such huge fans of the tree.

I just wish we knew how to get it into some sort of decent shape. It's not shaggy in a "ah, yes, it's a wild tree" way, it's just shaggy in a "wow, this is ugly" way.

Relatedly, if I wanted to put something under the feeder to make tidying the leftover spillage easier, what would I put there?

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From:

hudebnik

In our neighborhood, "shaggy overgrown evergreen tree in somebody's yard" usually means arborvitae. And some of them are really overgrown, threatening the adjacent house. When we bought our house in 2001, there were two or three small arborvitae trees along the property line between our front yard and the next door neighbor's. (I say "two or three" because they merged into one another and it really wasn't clear how many trunks there were.) We didn't do much maintenance on them for fifteen years, as they got shaggier and more indistinguishable. Then in 2019 or 2020,

shalmestere went out with some long-handled clippers to trim them, and she puts it, "the red mist descended"... anyway, we took them out completely, hired somebody to dig out the roots with a machine, and put a couple of lilacs in their place, with about five kinds of violets as ground cover.

Last year the next door neighbor planted "dwarf" arborvitae, which allegedly never grow taller than 5-6 feet, all around the perimeter of his back yard. We'll see how they turn out.