Intense winds beat against our house last night and I woke up this morning to yet another branch down on Joe. Say it ain’t so, Joe!

Joe is our pet name for the Kentucky Coffee Tree we lovingly selected and planted in our city’s right of way. (I just googled and learned that this strip of yard has many names. Huh.) The ash borer beetle has made its way to Lincoln, Nebraska, and we didn’t want to wait for the bug to do its work. So we picked Joe as our ash replacement. But personifying a tree can have poor consequences. Just look at my heart after another storm.

Joe is quite exposed to the elements. He doesn’t have another tree nearby and he doesn’t receive shelter from our home either. For years now he has bent and twisted among the prairie winds, but the past year has seen limb after limb broken.

The linden tree to the north of us looks great.

The ornamental cherry to the south is a-okay.

But Joe appears to be following the storyline from The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein only… that’s not what we’re asking of you, Joe!

Ugh.

Our entire street was once a parade of ash trees. Apparently developers in the late ‘90s/early aughts were unconcerned with aboreal diversity. Prior to that it was most likely farmland. And prior to *that* it was what all of Nebraska was before white guys showed up. Prairie. Lots of room for wind to blow, for bison to roam, for tribes to live their more-nomadic existences.

So really, why is a Kentucky Coffee Tree even in Nebraska?

We’re a plains state! We favor plants that can survive snowstorms and ice storms and then tolerate summer droughts and sun-baked clay soils. While there is incredible diversity among prairie plants (go visit UNL’s Morrill Hall to learn more), there simply were not a lot of trees around here until fairly recently.

When we moved into our current home there were beautiful twisted river oaks out back in a culvert. I loved them from the get-go, though most have been removed now for safety reasons. Those were the type of trees originally found in low-lying spots. Kentucky Coffee Trees? Not so much.

Did the first pioneer settlers cry over broken trees?

I bet they did.

I’m in decent company, I guess.