The grand old tree is dead.
Bob made me one of the best cosmopolitans I’ve ever had and the arch in his house, just beautiful and the tree, a loss.
Faubourg St. John losing spectacular old magnolia
Beloved tree too far gone from termites
Thursday, July 09, 2009
By Katy Reckdahl
Staff writer – Times Picayune
Madeline Peyton may wear a black armband today, in mourning for a fallen companion: the spectacular magnolia tree that’s shaded her house on LePage Street since she moved there 35 years ago. She’ll miss its massive roots in her side yard, the fragrance from its flowers in the springtime and the way the wind sounds as it moves through the tree’s branches.
“I’m losing a friend,” she said.
Arborists will begin to cut into the badly termite-damaged tree today in a three-day, $10,000 process that will use cranes to lift the tree’s heavy branches as they’re removed, to avoid damage to Peyton’s property and the “twin” house next door that she’s been told were originally built in 1880 by two sisters whom she knows only by their last name: Eschmann.
The neighboring house, a mirror image of hers, belongs to Bob Roso, who is also trying to steel himself for the tree’s upcoming absence. “I don’t want to get too emotional,” he said.
Until today, the tree in the Bayou St. John neighborhood was likely the second-largest magnolia tree in the city, second only to one on the Loyola University campus, arborists told them. But late last month, a huge limb dropped from the tree, revealing the extent of the termites’ devastation. A parade of arborists has advised them that the damage was terminal.
Years ago, Peyton was given an old photo of her house and the tree, by an elderly woman from the Eschmann family who lived in part of what became Roso’s house before moving into a nursing home. “All she said is, ‘This is a picture of your house: I thought you might like to have it,’ ” Peyton said. She can’t identify the two men and the woman captured in the yellowing image, standing in front of the house’s wrought-iron fence. But from the outfits, they estimate that the photo was taken around 1900 and that the tree was then about 20 years old.
The two neighbors speculate that after the sisters built the houses, they planted the magnolia on the exact center of the shared property line, halfway between the side porches that face each other.
Merlin Eschmann, 81, answered the phone at his Metairie home on Wednesday and shed some light on the houses’ history. Even 70 years ago, when he was a boy, the magnolia’s trunk was too wide to climb, he said.
“It was a tremendous tree even then,” said Eschmann, the son of a florist who grew up around the corner in a house on North White Street. His cousins Laura and Julia Richards lived in Peyton’s house and his aunt Sarah Eschmann lived in the other home. Aunt Sarah lived with and kept house for his Uncle Beanie, whose given name Eschmann has now forgotten despite still-vivid memories of the weekly nickels he’d get from the relative, an engraver at Adler’s jewelry store who also created an elaborate wooden arch between two rooms of his aunt’s house, he said.
As a boy, Eschmann said, he and his brother Joe would take a shortcut to the twin houses through the Richardses’ chicken yard, located behind their house and next door to his. His kin constantly walked between the houses, he said. “We were a very close-knit family.”
The tree, which was like part of his family, had been planted by the previous generation of his family, he said, recalling its fragrant blossoms and broad canopy. It’s sad to think of the houses without that tree “after so long,” he said.
Roso and Peyton will each save a slice of the tree trunk, they said. And they have talked about planting another tree in place of the magnolia. “Maybe we’ll plant a new tree and create a new history,” he said.
Then, they may stand in front of the wrought-iron fence and pose for a new photo with their new tree, she said.
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Katy Reckdahl