A Tree Grower's Diary: Purple European Beech Journal

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About the Tree Grower's Diary

by Julie Walton Shaver

Julie_photographer.jpg


I am a writer, a photographer,
a storyteller . . .


Here's my tree story.

I grew up in Aiken, South Carolina, under the live oak canopy above South Boundary Street. Aiken is a hot, humid place in summer. I remember thinking as a very young girl how wonderful it was to have that cooling canopy over the street. Thus, my love of trees began.

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Photograph of live oaks in Aiken, South Carolina,
by Larry Gleason


The Tree Grower's Diary started out as a little white notebook I kept in a drawer in the living room where I live now, in Metuchen, New Jersey. Each section of the notebook featured a different tree we had planted in our yard, showing how big the tree was when we planted it. You could lift a picture to see the following year's picture. If you flipped the pictures really fast, it was like one of those old nickelodeon machines. Dare a visitor to my home ask about my hobbies. I'd spend an hour flipping through my tree pictures, trying to convince friends and strangers alike that it's fun to watch trees grow!

Long about 1999, I showed that notebook to the Webmaster at Coffeedrome, my mentor and good friend. I knew nothing about Web sites then, so he started the online diary, which began as a simple letter with a few pictures of my trees. As the years went by, I asked the Webmaster to add more pictures, and eventually, we worked together to redesign the site into a tree-specific, user-friendly resource. People from all over the world check out my little "notebook" now, usually stopping by while researching types of trees they might be interested in planting in their own yards.

How it all got started
Before we moved to our new home, we lived in a condo with a Western exposure, no shade, and condo association rules that forbade the planting of anything taller than a petunia. It was so bright in my living room that I had to keep the curtains drawn all the time. If only I could have planted a tree for shade! I can't stand to be cooped up in a windowless house!

So we moved.

Our new house was in an established neighborhood with lots of tall shade trees. I was in tree heaven. Our yard alone had four good-sized shade trees and a nice flowering dogwood. Within one year, three of our shade trees were dead. (They were old and I didn't know a thing about trees when we bought the house. If I had known then what I know now, I would have known all three of those trees were goners. Besides, two of them were Norway maples, notoriously short-lived trees because of girdling roots. The other, by the way, was a pretty river birch that bit the dust after an ice storm bent it in half.)

Our yard was suddenly bright and sunny. I wanted shade. The planting of trees began. I figured I'd forget when I planted them. Thus began the notebook which led to the Tree Grower's Diary. I've made a lot of mistakes and I've learned a lot about trees since this project began in 1996. Ultimately, my goal is to help prevent other homeowners from making the same mistakes I did, like planting a bee-attracting purple leaf plum right next to a tree house! (If the tree's tag had said anything about fruit, I might have realized it wasn't the right tree for that spot.)

I became interested in photography in my last semester of college. My tree project has allowed me the opportunity to practice on somewhat stationary objects, learning how to use the features of my cameras so that when I'm faced with photography projects that involve people, I know what to do -- how to frame subjects, how to balance texture and color, how to position my camera so that the light will be in the right place. To study my tree site back to 1996 is to notice that my photography has improved a bit. (June 2008: I am currently shooting with a Nikon D3.)

In 2005 alone, Julie's tree pages on Coffeedrome logged over 120,000 page views!

On April 4, 2006, I decided to take the diary solo and launched TreeGrower'sDiary.com. My little white notebook has its own Blog now! This is HUGE!

Copyright 1996-2008, Julie Walton Shaver.