'On the Beach', Not Being Able to See the Forest for the Trees and Permaculture?

The stumps of the two trees that
 I had cut down this month

The two trees as they looked
last year when I moved in

I've had a lot of strange personal synchronicities while I have been reading Nevil Shute's novel 'On the Beach' and I will be writing about a few more of those in upcoming posts, but this one involves two trees that I decided to get cut down a week ago, because the roots of the trees were finally starting to impact on my home's water pipes and pavement.

I had been thinking of getting the trees cut down for some months now and kept putting it off because my feathered friends and other wildlife really loved these trees.
It's just that whoever planted these two trees never gave much thought to the confined area they had planted them in, or the impact these trees were going to have on surrounding properties and structures.
The Spirit of the Lily and the Lillypilly?

Since I have been on a strict no dairy-vegetarian diet for over six months I have been thinking of growing some of my own food in the backyard and have been influenced by reading and listening to posts and podcasts about permaculture, like in this post I wrote after reading a post at the 'Rune Soup' blog -

Retrosuburbia?

The week before I had the trees cut down, I was mulling about getting the stumps removed as well, so I could plant a garden over the top of where the trees had been.
I decided to leave the stumps in the ground for now until I decided what I was going to plant in the garden.

The view of my garden from my computer
room with the trees gone

EVIL spelled backwards
is LIVE, by the way:-)

The weird thing was that the day the trees were to be cut down I was reading the novel 'On the Beach' after watching the movie on STAN (and ironically 'On the Beach' was produced and directed by STANley Kramer) at the end of May, and I came across this passage where a discussion was being had about removing two trees from a backyard in order to plant a vegetable garden -

""It's no concern of ours, anyway," he said."Lots of things are going a bit weird these days."
She nodded, and started pottering about the garden while he watered. Presently she said, "I've been thinking, Peter. Could we take out those two trees, do you think?"
He came and looked at them with her. "I'd have to ask the landlord, "he said. What do you want to take them out for?"
"We've got so little space for growing vegetables, " she said. "They are so expensive in the shops. If we could take those trees out and cut back the wattle we could make a kitchen garden here, from here to here." She indicated with her hands."I'm sure we could save nearly a pound a week by growing our own stuff. And it would be fun, too."
He went to survey the trees. "I could get them down all right," he said, "and there's a nice bit of firewood in them. It 'ld be green, of course, too green to burn this winter. We'd have to stack it for a year. The only thing is, getting out the stumps. It's quite a big job, that."
"There are only two of them," she said. "I could help - keep on nibbling at them while you're away. If we could get them out this winter and dig the ground over, I could plant it in the spring and we'd have vegetables all next summer." She paused. "Peas and beans," she said.
"And a vegetable marrow. I'd make marrow jam."
"Good idea," he said. He looked the trees up and down. "They're not very big," he said. "It'ld be better for the pine if they came out."
"Another thing I want to do," she said, "is to put in a flowering gum tree, here. I think that 'ld look lovely in the summer."
"Takes about five years to come into bloom," he said.    
"Never mind. A gum tree there would be justly lovely, up against the blue of the sea. We could see it from our bedroom window."

They go on in the novel planning their garden for the next ten years, but they know full well that come next spring the nuclear winter (ironically enough) will kill everybody in the area.

It wasn't lost on me that Ava GARDNER was one of the main stars in the movie version of 'On the Beach', either;-)

I guess it's a reminder in a way that we only have one planet, so we better look after it before it's way too late.

Now, where can I plant those mushrooms?-)

It's certainly a scary trip reading 'On the Beach' and thinking about the future of my own backyard.
David Griffin, Liz Fraser and Black (Goo) Milk?

Digging Through Anthropology, Animism and Panpsychism with Dr. Jack Hunter?

UPDATE: 2018

Was 'On The Beach' Cursed in Hindsight?