This afternoon we had a visit from the tree surgeon, to take a look at the tree we have at the end of our back garden.
I say a tree – however the tree surgeon was less polite, as he doesn’t really class it as a tree! Essentially what we have is a stump of an Ash tree, but over the years a large number of new stems have grown up out of the old stump. You can see in the picture here, taken last year, quite how much it has grown up. As the tree surgeon said, what we have is a lot of relatively small stems, but hooked up to the extensive root system of a large tree, all of which contributes to a pretty spectacular growth rate. However, what you have to factor in is that the stems have relatively little strength, so are growing beyond what they can really support, and ultimately will snap off.
As a result, it needs to be periodically cut back in order to keep the whole thing safe, and that is what was going on this afternoon.
The fact that it is all stems gives the tree surgeon a bit of a problem though, as to get to the upper reaches of the tree, he needs to climb it – and since these aren’t the strongest stems, it’s quite a job, involving a lot of safety ropes running across multiple stems for strength.
Having said that, it was an impressive thing to watch, as the pretty well built tree surgeon climbed his way up the tree with his chain-saw.
He started off taking out completely some of the smaller, less well attached stems. He then also took out some of the low hanging branches that in summer obstruct the pavement behind the house. From there he went up to top of the tree and cleared the smaller branches from the top, taking about a third off the overall height of the tree. From there it was some tidying up further down, and then finally taking out a couple of the remaining major stems – some of which he’d just climbed – in order to thin out the tree. The one final task was to cut out the bottom reaches of the ivy that is rapidly climbing some of the main stems, as this will also add to the weight.
Looking at the after picture here, you can see what a dramatic difference it makes. To indicate quite how much growth the tree produces, this takes the tree back to the size it was when we moved in back in 2001. As the tree surgeon said, it looks a bit dramatic at the moment, but thanks to the vast root system the tree will fairly quickly recover and produce new growth, and hopefully will be okay for another few years before we need to cut it back again.