Aside

I really love the way my Chaste Tree grows.  When I planted it in 2011, it was about a foot and a half tall.  Now it's up to ten feet, and will reach twelve or more by the end of this year.  How can I tell?

See the long, thin branches sticking practically straight up from the top?  The rest of the overall form is fairly rounded, but every Spring, a few whip-like branches streeeeetch out higher than the rest of the tree, and throughout the remainder of the year, the rest of the tree catches up.  It actually tells me how tall it's about to get.  

Hee. 

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I did three new things with the Chaste Tree this spring.  Firstly, I finally caved and lopped off the "extra" trunk that it had in previous years: 

2013, at two years old

See the little guy on the left?  When the tree was small, it contributed to the whole plant looking fairly balanced.  But as the tree has grown, that extra trunk on the left side grew unevenly, ending up tilted far to the left and much weaker than the rest of the tree.  It also isn't attached to the rest of the tree - I think this may have originally been two saplings in the same container, and I didn't realize it when I planted it.  Anyway, I cut it off to allow the main tree to grow, and it looks far more balanced and sculptural now.  

The second thing I did was to remove the little ring of stacked [cement] stones that I placed around it in 2012, to keep a certain black fuzzy dog from digging it up.  In the picture above, there was a good 3-5" of space between the trunk of the little tree and any one side of the stone ring (you can see the whippy branches on top in this picture, too; the tree doubled in size in 2012 and in 2013!)  But this year, the trunk of the tree has gotten so wide that a couple of the stones were nearly touching it.   Time to let the tree free! 

Lastly, I nabbed a little Texas Gold Columbine plant on my last trip to The Natural Gardener, and planted it a few feet away from the base of the Chaste Tree, to sort of anchor it in the growing landscape (pun intended) and to add more color and more native plantings to the yard.  You can kind of see it in the first picture - a little blob of green with a couple of those stones placed around it to keep it safe while it gets established.

It's part of a larger plan, but before I launch into what should really be its own blog post...

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