I am shocked that the Anne Frank House is claiming that Anne's tree
is "as good as dead." There are a lot of news photos out there of
Anne's tree in winter; of course it looks dead in the winter. They know
very well the tree is not dead: there are
videos of it on YouTube: a giant tree
full of lush green leaves. I've seen dead trees; their leaves are dead and
remain on the tree; spring comes, and the tree never comes back to life.
Anne's tree has some problems, yes. But it's not "as good as dead." It's an outrageous statement. Maybe the translation was poor. Presumably this beautiful video is from the summer of 2006. And this video is of the "amputation" the Anne Frank House talks about making it "as good as dead." It took off maybe the top 25%, if that much.
Watch when they
bring a branch down to the street for shredding,
you can see how a single branch (one of many) that
looked so small when it was cut out of the giant tree, looks as big as a tree
itself. The first one they show is probably 15 feet tall. Scientists
estimated that trunk is
very rotted out, yet it's supporting this massive living tree. In light of
that, I think
there is reason for skepticism of those scientific claims. I'm suspicious
of this claim to web visitors that it is practically dead.
I am thinking the second set of
scientists could be right: those were the ones who convinced a judge to
order the tree's owner
to search for alternatives to chopping it
down (see the 21 Nov entry).
