After reading about what will happen to the old oak in Oak Harbor I was wondering why the city council doesn’t decide to use every piece of this tree.

Allow wood carvers from all over the island and off to use it to make carvings or whatever. There are enough that come to the Coupeville Arts & Craft Festival that I am sure the wood could be put to good use even after a large section was saved to make a bench or a nice carving as Dorothy suggested. The city might even make some money off the old tree. We should memorialize such a great tree that we had.

I remember when we moved here over 30 years ago that the city was planning to do something to help save the tree and then they built a parking lot around it with the new post office! I blame the city for the destruction of the tree.

Some cities would have tried a long time ago to save it and we did nothing. Trees have to have oxygen to their roots and the easiest way to kill a tree is plant it in the middle of a parking lot or near a major road. They can’t get water or oxygen and they die. I am sure the parking lot for the post office did not help matters with the tree. Yet we still want to “beautify the city” and suggest businesses do this very thing over and over again. It might take awhile for the trees or plants to die, but it happens. Everything that we do to trees adds to how they live. What we did to the old oak caused stress and stress allowed the tree to be exposed to more things that cause decay and rot. If a tree is healthy (being surrounded by yards and fields) it can fight off a lot of the other things that could destroy it. When the post office was built there it signed the death warrant for the old tree. I just hope in the future the city thinks long and hard about memorializing things before they work so hard to kill it.

Sheila Ryan

Oak Harbor