Comment by hagbard_c

2 days ago

This somewhat silly statement reminds me of when a city person moved in to a house on a piece of land bordered on all sides by mine in rural Sweden. Come autumn the trees - of which we have many, living on the forest edge as we do - started shedding leaves which also ended up on the gravel path leading to his house. He came to me and asked me to remove those trees bordering the path because they drop leaves on it which he doesn't want there. I had to explain to him that he no longer lived in the city where the streets are swept, that instead he now more or less lived in the forest where trees are the dominant life form and that these happened to be mostly deciduous trees which shed their leaves every autumn and as such the solution to his conundrum is not to urbanise the forest but to accept the occasional cover of leaves and the occasional branch on the path, remove them when they're in the way and otherwise just leave them be. Not long after that he bought a garden tractor which he now uses in a futile attempt to recreate his urban park in the forest. The trees keep on winning though, they're many against his one tractor.