Sunday, April 08, 2007

Vacation - Day Three

We made it to Pompano Beach before dark yesterday and found Brother Bill's house. An apartment, actually.

I'm going to drink coffee and go our for a newspaper. The dead-tree newspaper still has a certain appeal that this compter just doesn't. That, and I'm pirating internet access from a network somewhere in the neighborhood.

This is a Norfolk Island Pine tree, notice the lack of limbs below a certain height, and a rather common pine configuration above. What do you suppose happened to those limbs? People who kno tell me that the tree gets pretty and full when it is allowed to grow unmolested.


UPDATE: Later, we found that there are casinos in south Florida, and spent a couple of hours helping the Seminoles with their cash flow. We later made it to the beach, where the chill wind coming off the ocean made the experience almost unpleasant. We were at the beach for nnly a half-hour before Milady was ready to go back to the car.



The evidence shot is above.

2 comments:

Rivrdog said...

Hard to tell from the picture, but many conifer species have clear trunks. Out here in OR, we have fir that can have 80 feet of clear trunk.

They may have been trimmed to make them grow taller, or there might have been a series of fires that only got to the lower limbs as the tree grew. Hard to tell.

Anonymous said...

Im in FLA, the limbs get blown off from the winds during the storms and agressive pruning to stop the limbs from getting blown off during the storms. The pines that actually get storm hit usually just get topped by the storm, its the oaks and stuff that get blown down. Were arboreal challenged in FLA, theyre always trying to improve on nature. I mean a hurricane hits you got more troubles than the tree in your yard falling if you know what I mean.