Strike Three! They are Out!

I wish I were talking about baseball here but, unfortunately, it's all about our trees. We have this tiny grove of the most annoying trees behind our house and they have caused us nothing but trouble since we moved in. They are some sort of fast growing, thin, dense type tree that only has a life of about 10-12 years. We've been told by native Tennesseans that they do well in rocky ground.

Anyway, every time a heavy rainstorm hits with high winds one of them falls over into our driveway. (Choo and the neighbor have also removed one that died of natural causes and there is another one that has tumbled and is precariously being held up by a couple of the other trees.)

The first one fell the fall after we moved here. I had just taken Choo to the airport and driven through a nasty rainstorm to do it. When I got back to the house there was a tree, laying right across the driveway. As I was trying to figure out what to do a neighbor yelled at me from his patio (he was grilling) and said he'd be over with his chainsaw in a few minutes. After the chainsaw started, 3 more neighbors popped out of nowhere and the tree was chopped up and moved in 30 minutes. (The kids exclaimed that this would have never happened in our Chicago neighborhood!)

The second one fell during the fall of 2008 and, yes, the third one fell today!

So, Strike Three -> They Are Out! We are obtaining a quote to have them all removed and then we'll put in something different - I've been advised that we may have to backfill the embankment to make enough base for other trees to get their roots established. I'm OK with that, anything to have something different there that will be less maintenance than these have been. I'm dreaming of a maple, crepe myrtles and maybe another river birch.