Nathan adjusts the final grade on a newly planted Osmanthus fortunei 'fastigiata'

Busy days in the Asian Collections this week. Yesterday Nate and I assisted Sue Bentz and her crew in digging and caging eight? cool trees from the research field. We did have a treespade but there's still a significant amount of work to do and dirt to acquire. Today we planted them. This Osmanthus, though it's only a bit over 3 feet tall, had about a 600 pound rootball. Some of the balls were smaller but there were a couple more big ones. Sometimes, in a perfect world (rarely) when moving trees with a treespade, the spade can be maneuvered all the way to the planting site where it can pop out a chunk of soil and the newly spaded tree can be delivered, in the tree spade, directly there and lowered into the hole. That's works well in fields, not so much in garden areas. We were able to do that with two trees yesterday so today we hand planted the rest. Still, it's better than digging all the trees and all the holes. Anyway, they're all in now: Acer truncatum 'I forgot' (that's not the name of the cultivar, I really forgot what it was); Styphnolobium japoG nica 'columnaris', Osmanthus heterophyllus 'Purpureus', Maackia amurensis 'Starburst'; Staphylea holocarpa 'Innocence', Osmanthus fortunei 'fastigiata'. Exciting stuff. And, the tree contractor has been grinding stumps, including five in the Asian Collections. It's loud work and I'm afraid it negatively affected to quality of the experience for the volunteers, but they soldiered on and things are looking pretty good.