By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

Folk singer Judy Collins sang a number back in the '60s (or was it the '70s?) called “Both Sides Now.”

The first verse was about the pros and cons of clouds, but it applies as well to trees.

I've always been a lover of trees. As a youth, I wiled away many an hour nestled in the arms of a great oak in the woods behind our home, nibbling on the tart apples that grew in an old, untended orchard nearby and watching the wildlife that most people never see when they're in the woods because they're never still and quiet long enough.

In an age of air-conditioning, we don't think much about the cooling effect of trees, but if you're outside on a hot day, walking from direct sunlight into the shelter of a dense grove can be almost as much of a relief as going inside.

And aesthetically, you'll never convince me that the beach is better than the forest. The ocean has its own charm, but I could spend the rest of my life next to a singing brook surrounded by old-growth forest, and I'd be quite content.

I'm too old to climb trees now, though I occasionally do it anyway. And the trees that surround my house, though I dearly love to look at them, have become my enemies in a way.

A back injury made picking up acorns to keep them from killing my lawn so painful that I've taken to doing it lying down. Can't rake them because I've replanted the lawn and the grass is far too tender. I spent three hours in a space five feet wide and 40 feet long and filled a four-gallon bucket to brimming, and a week later you couldn't even tell I'd done it.

I had to pay someone several hundred dollars last year to remove a poplar that had grown up and severely damaged my fence, and there are other trees that will have to go for one maintenance-related reason or another, at equally great expense.

I'll spend hundreds of hours this fall, or pay someone if I can manage it, dealing with the fallen limbs, leaves, etc., and again next spring washing pollen off the windows and deck, and vacuuming hickory nut hulls out of the swimming pool — the branches closest to the pool seem to be where the neighborhood squirrels most enjoy having their communal meals.

Gradually, as I can afford it, I'm trying to relandscape the place with a little less grass and more room for the trees, and some other ideas I have for cutting down on the maintenance. I still love trees and don't want to lose more than is necessary, but because I've seen the problem from both sides, I do have a new perspective on efforts in Fayette to write laws that make it harder for land owners to do away with fine old specimen trees.

Sometimes, if you want to build a home or a store or office building, you just can't avoid doing away with some trees, even the ones that aren't in the space where you want to put the building and parking lot.

And if the amount of space you're able to devote to a large old tree is too small, it's going to die anyway and you might as well take it down during construction and plant something that fits.

Then again, some builders don't like trees at all. They're nothing but obstacles to be removed. Saving them is just way too much trouble, and if you do save a few, they're nothing but a maintenance problem once the project is finished.

Industrial developers like to bulldoze a site, often years before they plan to do any building. They say it's because the land sells better if it's stripped and ready to build on. Nonsense.

You might be thinking that what people do with the trees on their own property is nobody's business but their own. If that's the case, we need to completely rethink what we're doing in our local governments, because the books are full of regulations designed to make the developments within our communities aesthetically pleasing.

We seem to have accepted the idea that, if you're going to use your property to earn a profit from the community, then you have to do it in such a way that it adds to that community, as opposed to subtracting from it.

As long as the federal government keeps its bony nose out of the process, I have no problem with that concept.

Fayetteville and Fayette County officials are making themselves googly-eyed trying to write rules that will save more trees, but without being unreasonable. If you go too far on the unreasonableness scale, the law can't be defended in court, so it's useless.

For instance, Fayetteville planners were upset recently because they went to great lengths to force a company to preserve more trees in a project, but when the builders started work, they removed the protective fence that had been put around one of the trees and ran heavy equipment over its roots all day long, then replaced the fence as if nothing had happened.

That's probably a dead tree now. The question is whether the builders could have gotten their heavy equipment into the site without moving the fence. If not, then maybe forcing them to redesign the entire project to make space for that tree was unreasonable. If so, the law needs teeth to punish the builders for violating the tree-save area.

The problem facing the planners is how to write a law that would punish builders and developers sufficiently so they won't “accidentally” kill any more big trees, but won't force them to save a tree at all if they simply couldn't work the construction around it.

Fayetteville tabled its new tree law this week, but both city and county expect to get their new laws on the books soon.

Then we'll see how well they did.

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