I once heard a talk by an arborist from Mount Auburn Cemetery, and remember most clearly his describing how, when a tree or part of a tree falls in the cemetery, for some reason there’s usually little to no damage to the headstones and monuments. Time after time he’d seen this phenomenon, and while he could describe it, he couldn’t explain it.
The other day I was in Providence’s beautiful Swan Point Cemetery with my friend Jane. Rounding a bend, we came upon the sight of a large and very recently fallen (the leaves were just barely beginning to wilt) oak limb lying on the ground. We stopped to investigate, and found that while the limb had fallen directly in line with some headstones, it had only nudged the corner of one out of skew, and the others were intact. The limb had probably a four-foot high wound at its attachment point; from there, it arched out in front of a couple of stones before its elbow (an old pruning point, perhaps) had hit the ground. Beyond and above the elbow was a huge mass of branches, twigs, and foliage. The elbow had made a deep crater, about twenty inches wide– that’s how it pushed the stone out of alignment. We were astounded that no stones or the nearby tree were broken or harmed.
The trunk, the break, the biomass
Falling in the slot
Half the canopy, now on the ground
Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf
