Four Trees Removed at Middleton St George

Taking four trees out of one garden is not one job repeated four times. Each species cuts, drops and rigs differently, and each one sits differently in the space.

The order matters as well. You work the trees that give you room first, and you keep the drop zone over the softest ground you can find. On a garden with a shed, a store and a lawn, that decision is made before anything is cut.

Scots pine is a big tree to bring down in a garden. Straight stem, heavy side limbs, and timber that is denser than most of the broadleaves people are used to. Sections come down heavy, and they come down with resin on them.

Pine also carries its crown high, which means the climber is working at height for most of the job with a long stretch between tie-in points. The limbs were roped and lowered rather than dropped, because a pine limb landing on a lawn takes the lawn with it.

The timber was cut into short lengths. Pine is awkward to handle in long sections on a domestic site, and short lengths load and carry better.

Cypress is the opposite problem. Dense evergreen growth all the way to the ground, so there is no clean stem to climb and no clear view of what the tree is actually doing underneath the foliage.

The growth hides the structure, which is why cypress work starts with clearing a way in and finding the stems. It also produces a lot of material for its size, and the foliage does not compost down quickly, so it all goes through the chipper and off the site.

Cypress timber is brittle compared to pine. Pieces were kept small and controlled, and nothing was allowed to fall free through the crown.

A double stem tree is the one that needs the most thought. Two stems from one base means a union where they meet, and a union is a weak point. Where the bark grows into the join, which is called included bark, there is no wood holding the two stems together, only pressure.

That changes the whole approach. You cannot treat one stem as a separate tree and drop it, because the load it carries is shared with the stem that is staying. The work is sequenced so the stems are reduced evenly, and the rigging is set so nothing pulls the union apart.

Ash in the North East also carries dieback, so the crown was assessed before the climbing started. On a double stem tree, decay in the union is the thing that decides whether the job is a dismantle or an emergency.

The whitebeam came out on the same visit. Compact crown, dense growth, and the kind of tight structure that usually means it is sitting close to a boundary or over a path.

It was the smallest of the four and the quickest, but it still came down in sections rather than being felled, because there was nothing to fell it into. No photo of that one. It was down and chipped before the camera came out.

Domestic work is judged on what the garden looks like afterwards. Mats were used on the lawn along the barrow route, and the drop zones were kept off the grass where the ground was soft.

One tree at a time, chip cleared as we went, and the timber loaded rather than left to build up. A garden covered in four trees worth of arisings is a garden nobody can walk through, and it makes the last hour of the job twice as long.

On this job every piece of timber left with us. That was the instruction, and it is a common one. Not everybody wants a log pile at the end of the garden, and four trees would have produced a serious one.

The alternative is to log the timber and stack it where you want it for burning. Both are straightforward, but it needs deciding before the visit, because it changes how the timber is cut on site and how much space the truck needs.

The stumps were cut low. Grinding them out is a separate operation, and on four stumps in a lawn it is worth doing, because the alternative is a mowing hazard in the middle of the grass for the next few years.

Taking four trees out of a garden opens up light and space that was not there before. It also changes what the remaining trees are exposed to. The mature trees behind the shed are now carrying wind they were partly sheltered from, which is worth knowing before the next winter.