Jim? Re your big oak. Have you considered checking with an arborist to see if it's largely healthy and not hollow?. Perhaps taking off a branch on the house side, would put it into imbalance so that it would fall away from the house. Do you have prevailing winds there that would make a difference in what direction it'd be likely to fall? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim McKenney" <jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com> To: "'Pacific Bulb Society'" <pbs@lists.ibiblio.org> Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 8:43 PM Subject: [pbs] Spring off to a slow start Actually, it's worse than that. The garden is dominated by a massive black oak. Close to the ground the trunk is probably five feet in diameter; the main trunk ascends without branches perhaps sixty or more feet - and it narrows only very gradually.