The Garret Tree
Friday, August 21, 2009
  Major Ontario storm kills the original Garret Tree
Garret Tree Dec. 2005
The tree that inspired this blog, The Garret Tree, was brought down by the fierce line of storms that crossed southern Ontario on August 20, 2009. The same storm brought two [update five at last report] tornadoes, killed an eleven-year-old boy, injured a number of others and damaged or destroyed homes and businesses across the province.

CBC News story: Ontario storm devastates communities


As the storm struck across the province, I stayed at work at CBC, watching for news pictures and user photographs and monitoring Tweets of the storm from the public and competing media. So I did not get home until well after dark.

This morning a CBC colleague who had just moved in across the street mentioned in a Facebook status update that a neighbor's tree had crashed into his backyard during the storm. He told me how the tree trunk had come down across his yard and into the neighbor's on the other side.

It was a busy day at work for post storm coverage so it wasn't until I was on the way home that I wondered if it was the Garret Tree. There are/were two large trees across the street from my garret. And when I got home and looked out the attic window, unfortunately I discovered that the Garret Tree was a victim of the storm.




The empty sky where the Garret Tree once stood.















The Garrett Tree in a January, 2005 snowstorm.

















The Garret Tree in full leaf, June 2005.

















The Garret Tree in November, 2005.












(By the way, there was no other damage in the immediate neighborhood.)

I am currently redesigning this site. So with the death of the original Garret Tree, this will be the last entry in this blog. I will have new blog once the site is relaunched sometime this fall. Farewell leafy friend.

 
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I write in a renovated garret in my house in a part of Toronto, Canada, called "The Pocket." The blog is named for a tree can be seen outside the window of my garret.

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Name: Robin Rowland
Location: Toronto, Canada

I'm a Toronto-based writer, photographer, web producer, television producer, journalist and teacher. I'm author of five books, the latest A River Kwai Story: The Sonkrai Tribunal. The Garret tree is my blog on the writing life including my progress on my next book (which will be announced here some time in the coming months) My second blog, the Wampo, Nieke and Sonkrai follows the slow progress of my freelanced model railway based on my research on the Burma Thailand Railway (which is why it isn't updated that often) The Creative Guide to Research, based on my book published in 2000 is basically an archive of news, information and hints for both the online and the shoe-leather" researcher. (Google has taken over everything but there are still good hints there)



New blogs as of Sept. 2009
Robin's Weir
Tao of News

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