View from the trees.

Today we were felling a big old sycamore that should have been felled a few years ago - it was within a foot of an overhead power line and had been previously been sided up and the ivy covering it had been ringed - leaving it looking like a scruffy toilet brush rather than a tree. This would have been the result of either the land owner not wanting it out in the first place or a failure of communication somewhere down the line. I know we love to keep trees, but sometimes they just need to be removed rather than have them hard pruned which can be bad for a tree and often leave them looking unsightly and weakened. It’s down now, and the landowner has next winter’s firewood sorted.

I work for a company that has a contract to prune and maintain trees which are close to power lines - the electricity companies pay for the work, but sometimes people aren’t happy with getting hundreds of pounds worth of tree surgery work done at no cost to themselves…

Yesterday it was the other way round; a gentleman wanted his sycamore pollarded. What he really wanted was us to wave a magic wand and make a tree a third of its original size and still be a nice shape. I did my best to explain that what he’d be left with would be a big stick with no leaves on it. I might have made a good totem pole, but not a pretty tree. We convinced him to just have it trimmed a little and crown lifted. He thought we were just trying to pull a fast one. Ah well.