When we first moved into Maple Hoo, the front yard was perhaps the most boring, ugly front yard you could imagine. It was a swath of average-looking grass, the average suburban evergreen mustache foundation planting, and what looked at first glance to be a very average tree. The backyard was lush and green and wonderful, with its showy maple, majestic oak, and colorful sugar gum trees. The front yard tree was all trunk with some scraggly branches dotted with small roundish leaves. I was more than a little glum that my bedroom was the one that was going to look out over the boring front yard and the boring, boring tree. Our nosy, know-it-all neighbor informed us it was a linden tree, and for the first year of living at Maple Hoo I cursed the linden and how it didn’t fill my bedroom window with the kind of lush foliage I was hoping to find in my forever home. More than that, it looked less than sturdy. Boomer had some of its branches wired to the trunk, but that only made me more nervous that in a big storm, my bedroom was going to be smushed, with me in it, by massive ugly linden branches, adding injury to the insult of not getting a view of the maple.
But somewhere along the line I discovered the tree was actually quite beautiful.