An aspen story

This is my aspen bonsai (ok, prebonsai). It is still in a plastic container, but I am going to try and get a pot for it. 

I am in need of a lot of pots!

There is no great story about this tree, it comes from a forest in the area nearby. I have not done very much shaping, mostly kept it - as is my habit...

But instead I have taken pictures of a group of large aspen trees that I pass every now and then when I'm driving around in my work. For a long time I have been thinking "Those look like old and interesting trees, I should stop and take a closer look some day." Now I have done that.

They grow just beside the road on a slope. There are two old buildings beside them. I didn't know anything about them until my college told me this story:

One of the two old buildings was once a small shop! The oldest part (the timber part, closest in this picture) of it is from the 1700s.

 The other building is a small red house. There has also been a third house, a larger living house between these two.

In the beginnig of the twentieth century a family lived here with many children. The woman had a garden behind the shop-house where she growed white cabbage.

She planted the aspens around her garden. So they are about a hundred years old. Not particularly old for a treee really.

But these aspens look old, and one of them has fallen.

Old aspens have a high nature value in Sweden. They are good for insects and birds. The modern forestry favors pine and spruce, so old specimens of aspens are  fewer and fewer in the landscape. There are large areas with young aspens but the large populations of moose and roe deer keep them from growing up.

Some fifteen years ago, the owners wanted to take down these aspens. They were concerned about the old shop-house and wanted to save it from being crashed by a falling tree. They hired a forest-machine to make the tree-felling. Then, when the machine was already there and they were about to cut down the big trees, suddenly a wood-pecker flew out from a hole in one of the trees. That made the felling impossible! If there was a wood-pecker in the tree, it was forbidden to cut it down. The aspen group is now protected for nature reasons. Moss and mushroom, birds and insects, they have a refuge!