For the past several weeks, there's been this amazing brain-like fungus growing on the side of a tree on the VFW Parkway southbound, just past LaGrange. Every time I drove past, I thought it would make a great photo and vowed to stop next time. This morning, around 9:30, I saw the brain and vowed to stop on my way back (from Millennium Park). Around 10:30, I did - only to discover that in the interim, a vegetarian zombie (what else could it be?) had ripped the brain to shreds:

That'll teach me to put things off, right?

So before you start looking for a smelly cat, see if there are any ailanthus trees around.

It was nice to see some new trees planted across from Jamaica Pond this morning. They are just beside the recently refurbished wall.

I'd give them about 50 years.

Then they'll have to be cut down, after their roots destroy the wall again, and the wall be need to be restored.

Then new trees will be planted.

The cycle of life.

Some Assembly Required noticed today that crews along Huntington Avenue near the Mass. College of Art were replacing seemingly healthy trees with new seemingly health trees, and he wonders why.

Maybe Steven "I came home the other day to find out all my furniture had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica" Wright is now in charge of tree plantings in Boston?

... at the corner of Orchard and Beech Streets, in North Cambridge. It blocked half of Beech Street and a little bit of Orchard.

I don't know when it fell, but I saw it around 11:30 tonight. For some reason, five orange traffic cones were sitting on the sidewalk nearby, so I put them up all around the fallen tree. Maybe that will stop someone from running into it tonight.

If you see other fallen trees, post them as comments here.

Laura ponders Bradford pear trees, which, soothingly line the streets of Cambridge, but which also tend to die off fairly easily and stink up the joint after they flower:

.. the trees tend to self-destruct. Not as in, "KABOOM" - as in, if they are not pruned as they grow, their tightly-crowded branches push away from the too-narrow, thinly-barked trunk, opening their thumbprint shape into more of a round baby toenail stunted with fungus, leaving them susceptible to wind damage in the warmer months and ice damage in the colder months.