A farewell to trees...

I sent two of my seedling rescue trees -- the peach and the flowering crab -- to a better home in New Jersey. My daughter-in-law came up in her Honda and we were able to put the root balls in the passenger seat/well and then snake the supple trunks and branches through the place where the back seat folds down and reveals an opening to the trunk. Because they were supple we could curl them around the trunk.

I also sent her home with a forsythia that came home with me from the rescue garden by accident; seven or eight oenotheras; four rooted cuttings from the mystery broad-leafed evergreen, a piece of curly willow; a Looking Glass begonia and two coleus cuttings (the mutant trailing purple brocade and 'ruby jewels').

Next I think I'll administer the euthanasia to the potted elm. it will almost certainly catch Dutch Elm Disease when it reaches adulthood, if indeed it reaches adulthood in that pot. It was an accidental survival, a seedling I neglected to pull up. I could put the curly willow there and then put the tree I really like, the red-leafed maple I've been growing from a wee thing, where the willow was. Right now it's where the peach was.

Less shade now; maybe my tomatoes will be happy this year.

Some thoughts on taxation and generosity

I ran across this piece by Arnold Kling that sums up what I think about the forced charity known as government social programs:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/04/some_libertaria.html

My absolute favorite bit:

Think of government as a charity. From a libertarian perspective, it is a charity run by the Mafia, which will break your knuckles if you don't make your donations. It is also a badly mismanaged charity. It funnels lots of money into questionable causes, and even when the causes are good the programs that it funds tend to be very wasteful.

I would like to see government have to compete with other charities on a level playing field.

Hear, hear. I can give a dollar to charity and be reasonably sure that $.80 (or $.90 or $.70 but you get the idea) will go toward the charitable purpose. Or I can give a dollar to government and be reasonably sure that a fat chunk of it will be pissed away by the layers and layers of redistributionists who are getting their salaries before a penny goes to the ultimate purpose. Moreover, I can check up on the charity and decide whether it's run efficently enough to be worthy of my dollars. With the government programs, not so much.