Better than bonsai.

05 Aug 2005

Just before we moved into our new house earlier this year, I posted thirty-nine photos of it (empty). The first comment read something like this:

A house without furniture is one thing. An atrium without Bonsai is a crime.

– Sam

Well, today we were chopping a moderate-sized mulberry tree (read: big enough to put a sizable dent in our house, or the house next door, if we weren’t really careful. Actually, we’d already had a limb fall on the roof of the neighbours behind us, which we carefully — and by that I mean with a chainsaw — removed without any damage) that decided it’d love to fall into the back of our house. You can sort of see the mulberry tree in this photo… it’s the massive one towards the right of frame, but the sun obscures its density somewhat.

Mercifully, we were cutting high up enough that it didn’t quite fall far enough to crash into the glass itself — we hadn’t thought that far ahead, otherwise we would have shut the crazy roof shutter things as a precaution — but it did slam into the back of the house, and the doors were open (because we were running power to outside… the usual)… so, presto, our atrium becomes a garden.

I didn’t think anything of it (aside from “oh, crap, this is going to take some cleaning up” and “oops, there goes the back wall of our house”, amongst other things) until later, so unfortunately the photo isn’t as good as it could have been:

Just… imagine it with a rather dense tree there. It’s better than a bonsai-filled atrium. It’s an indoor micro-forest!