Disaster!

Remeber a few weeks ago when I showed off the pictures of our wisteria vines that are twined around the hammock stand we built in our backyard? If not, you can click this link and see the post. We've been bringing those vines along to make our hammock stand look awesome for years...you can click this link to see my post from a year ago touting its progress.

Well, the flowers faded away, and it was just a leafy vine for a few weeks, but just today, the flowers returned.

That's nice and all, and normally I'd be excited to see them, but just a few days ago, this happened:

Aaagh! Out of the blue, the vine we've been carefully cultivating for several years just up and dried out and died!

This was it at the end of April:

And this is what it looks like today?

Two weeks, and it's a total goner? This sucks. It was years before it got to this level.

My wife thinks the guys who resurfaced our pool may have dumped something out there or spilled something there and it killed the tree off. I don't know. 

They say we're having a bit of a drought here in Houston, but that's only if you've never lived in the western United States and you don't know what a real drought is. We still get rain, and I can't imagine the plant was so brittle that it was about to keel over dead if it wasn't receiving rain on a weekly basis, so I think my wife is probably right.

So, the pool looks better, but now the hammock stand looks worse as a result.

It's not 100% dead, there's these shoots from the base of it that survived, but those are a long way from climbing up the post and draping down from above replete with flowers.

I'm really bummed about this. The backyard was really coming together. Starting to look nice in all the areas after all the work we've done on it. Then, BAM! Right in the middle of that, something that can't just be quickly replaced happens, and it'll be years before it's complete again.