Natural catastrophe to natural wonders
12.03.89
Time doesn't always knock. In the case of Amy and David Pollack, it crashed in their front yard.
Almost 10 years ago, Blow Floyd uprooted the enormous century-old beech tree that dominated the combine's traditional front lawn in Swarthmore. Today, that same order is a naturalistic landscape of soft lines and radical color, with a pond that rocks in spring with the kreek-eek, kreek-eek of animated frogs looking for hookups.
"These are not on a par-cut perennial beds. They're moving, flowing spaces," says Amy, a gory designer whose husband is a pediatrician.
The metamorphosis began with Floyd, whose wild winds catapulted the beech's search ball out of the ground and hurled the tree unalloyed down the yard, into Ogden Avenue, like a riled-up sumo wrestler.
It didn't hit any cars and, mercifully, it didn't be overthrown back on the house, where the Pollacks' two children, then ages 11 and 14, played on the second-best floor.
The tree's wide branches did wound the neighbors' driveways and yards. And the whole subject left the Pollacks' yard a mud-caked mess of deep gashes, including a tree-crater that was 6 feet sage, 15 feet wide, and filled with drinking-water.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer