Thanks for the kind words!

Very much the same here, perhaps even more common.

The size of the place really lends itself to a far different sort of forestry, one much more oriented to wild-seeded growth than the cultivated forestry I remember on your side of the Puddle.

Trees are rarely shaped or tended here, even in residential areas, and much more pervasive in the larger lots in America. For every ornamental you'll see two native full-sized trees in any neighbourhood, certainly in the northeast of the country. In our garden there is an old mountain dogwood, a pair of huge holly trees, a rather tired old maple out behind the workshop, and a maple I planted as a six-foot sapling which is now a beautifully filled out sixty-footer.

There is a forest area covering the ridge just to our west, an area well-suited to driving in small open cars, called the Michaux State Forest. It is protected land, but at 85,000 acres or so there is no real attempt to clear under the trees or tidy up. Every now and then a section of it catches and burns off the leaf accumulation and tree debris (actually a natural occurrence and part of the forest growth cycle) such as what happened this spring if you remember my photos.

Meanwhile, trees just grow here pretty much everywhere they can, all on their own.