Lat night's full moon was brilliantly beautiful and this morning's sunrise was warmly cheerful, however......

The winds Friday took down two giant oaks in the Japanese Woodland section of the Asian Collections. Feeling pretty good about the beginning of the week I got to the Arboretum about 6:30. I drove past the middle entrance to the collection once without noticing anything amiss. I looped around in the parking lot to see things from the opposite direction and noticed the four cones blocking the main path. With some trepidation/dread, I walked down and found two large oaks had fallen; actually, one uprooted and the force of its fall snapped the second tree off at ground level.......oh my.

They fell parallel to the trail away from where I stood taking the picture. Both trees ended up almost entirely in bed "N" which is relatively long and narrow. The closer tree uprooted but the second tree, the one that Pat is standing on, had rot issues and basically broke off at ground level. From what we could see without chainsaw investigating, we decided that, had the trees fallen in almost any other direction, the damage would have been worse. Small consolation perhaps, but...... This is the same storm system that killed upwards of 25 people farther south, so we got off lightly. And we got some practice rehabilitating disaster areas last year when the giant Cedar fell in China Valley.