Seattle Times
by Eric Lacitis
25 Apr 12
SEATTLE - In the past five years, working by himself using mostly a shovel and a pickax, Bernie O'Brien has dug up, loaded onto his 30-year-old Ford pickup and then transplanted some 100 trees that weighed 200 pounds to more than 400 pounds each.
He's also transplanted to acreage he and his wife own on Puget Sound's Key Peninsula another 400 trees that ranged from seedlings to 6-footers.
Yes, you could call O'Brien a man with a passion.
His wife, Michelle McCormick, calls him the "the human shovel."
This 51-year-old Seattle guy, who talks about the trees he has transplanted as if they're members of his family, has rescued hundreds of trees from being bulldozed or simply cut down. He has given them new homes.
As O'Brien explains, "Trees are not just a number and we can never have too many. They, too, have character."
When a neighbor by his five-acre Key Peninsula property cut down a bunch of old-growth trees, O'Brien says, he noticed that the owls he could hear at night went away.
And O'Brien liked the privacy the old trees gave him, and wanted to replace the rampant blackberry bushes. He decided he would create his own forest on the five acres that's mostly pastureland and used to be a holly tree farm, with the original home still on it.
O'Brien does get a little mystical-sounding when talking about trees.
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This nature stuff isn't a trait that's just part of the stereotypical Northwest character, says Cass Turnbull, a landscaper who founded Plant Amnesty in Seattle "to lead society out of the dark ages of landscape care."
With 900 members nationwide and in four countries who believe, for example, that trees shouldn't be topped for landscaping purposes, she says, "I get calls and emails all the time from people who say they are spiritually involved with trees. Trees have a silent, timeless grandeur. It's a theme that runs through all cultures and places. You've heard references to the 'speaking tree?' "
On a recent Friday morning, yet another cold, rainy day, O'Brien has driven to a Bellevue rambler that is scheduled to be demolished.
He says the rambler's previous owner, who had planted the property with numerous shrubs and trees, is now in a nursing home. Soon a bulldozer is set to come in.
One way that O'Brien finds out about a tree that somebody wants to give away is by scouring Craigslist, and sometimes posting on it. Dogwoods, firs, hemlocks, rhodies, mountain huckleberries.
At one point, he had an app for his smartphone that messaged him every time the word "tree" came up on Craigslist. O'Brien gave up the app when he was deluged with messages such as ones about cat trees, those carpeted things for cats to scratch on.
"If you have trees that have been planted too close to the house, planted under wires, outgrown their space in the city. ... Then I have a good home for them," he posts. "Max thickness is 5" trunk ... I dig these up myself so imagine how much one person could physically take on."
It turns out there are plenty of people who want to find that good home for the tree they no longer can keep.
On his property, by the entrance, O'Brien planted a Douglas fir that now is around 7 feet tall.
About three years ago, a 10-year-old boy answered O'Brien's Craigslist posting and said he had a tree that he been growing in a barrel since it was a seedling in the backyard of his family home. He had gotten it at a Weyerhaeuser field trip. His parents said the tree had gotten too big and had to go.
O'Brien planted the tree, and the boy could look it up on O'Brien's website bernieo.smugmug.com/WoodlandGardenProject.
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O'Brien says that after a day of prying root balls, and dragging trees, he aches for the next three days.
But, he tells his wife, "I keep reminding her that the exercise is keeping me alive ... spirits and physical health."
On this Friday, in the later morning, accompanied by his Pomeranian dog, Diego, O'Brien drives onto the ferry to reach the Key Peninsula.
Sometimes his wife asks O'Brien how many more trees he is going to plant. At some point, those 500 trees that were planted will grow up to be big, big trees.
O'Brien talks about maybe buying more acreage. He talks about turning his tree farm into some kind of retreat place.
He talks about knowing a 70-year-old man who still plows his farmland.
"I have no doubts I could keep doing this until I was 70," says O'Brien.
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Say what you will about people who find spirituality in trees.
This is one content guy who says about transplanting trees: "I sleep well."
http://www.courierpress.com/news/201...trees/?print=1
