I Live in a Jungle

Alex trying to mow down the grass out our back door
that had been neglected for about a year while we
were away. There is a fence in there somewhere.

Alright, I'm gonna say this because somebody's got to. Basically, the coastal Pacific Northwest is a jungle. Virtually every square inch of soil that isn't covered by pavement or a structure or controlled by herbicides is naturally overrun by aggressive greenery. We have no shortage of trees or plant life here and if you don't keep ahead of the green invasion, you'll find yourself overgrown by Himalayan blackberry bushes, various grasses/weeds and rapidly propagating deciduous trees. There is absolutely no need to to plant or cultivate anything to have green matter as the conditions here are ideal for plant life to grow spontaneously. Some people are really into this whole "jungle" bit, but others just get to a point where they've had enough and move to places like Arizona, where you can literally have rocks for your entire yard and it's perfectly acceptable.

Tree shrine at Green Lake Park.

I have to chuckle with the irony of people who lament the loss of a beloved tree. A few years ago when I was running on the trail around Green Lake in Seattle, a woman and her child handed me a camera and wanted me to take a picture of them with a tree stump that they had memorialized with a flowered shrine. I took the picture for them but I couldn't help but think how bizarre this was. The woman was sad, and still mourning the loss of a tree she thought was special for some reason. I mean, it's a tree. I'm not sure about the fate of the tree, but by the size of the stump, it was at or near the end of its life anyway. When a tree blows down, gets diseased or even gets cut down for lumber, you simply plant another one in its place. That's the beauty behind a renewable resource... and in the Pacific Northwest, it's gonna grow no matter what.