![\"null\"](\"http:\/\/micro-trike.co.uk\/images\/treecut1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWithin an hour a large tractor and a van came trundling through the entrance to my garden containing a workforce comprised of… just two men.<\/p>\n
They’d obviously taken my email seriously because they’d hardly come prepared, having brought with them just a small pair of aluminium stepladders and a large Stihl chainsaw. I had to loan them my ladder so they could fix a cable about 10 metres or so up the trunk of the tree with the other end attached to their tractor, which they parked over in the corner of my front garden. Then they, well one of them anyway, got cracking with the Stihl while the other who drove the van just stood and videoed proceedings on his iPhone.<\/p>\n It took just a few minutes to take a large slice out of the front of the tree and cut a slot opposite it in the back.<\/p>\n Then it was a simple matter for the chap who’d been watching the proceedings up to that point to rev up the tractor and begin to slowly haul the cable in. Timber… the tree gave an almighty creek and began to topple onto the front lawn, constrained by the cable so it could only fall in one direction, away from the house.<\/p>\n And down it came with a few creeks, a splitting noise and a muted crash as it hit the ground.<\/p>\n And that was that. I guess that it had taken more than 200 years to achieve the state that it had been in, but it took less than 15 minutes to reduce it to a heap of shattered branches and wood debris spread across my lawn. As the cable operative set to to rewind the cable onto the back of the tractor and drive it out of the corner of my garden, the Stihl man spent a few minutes wielding his chainsaw to separate a few of the larger branches from the main trunk.<\/p>\n And that was also that for the day. They’d obviously decided that they’d done enough to justify their visit and packed up to go, wishing me a ‘bon weekend’ and saying that they’d be back on Monday, or Tuesday maybe, to finish off the job and clear up. I’m hoping that that means by the end of the coming week, but now the tree’s down so it can’t continue growing over the coming (hopefully) summer, I’m not overly worried about timing. After all, although I’m at their mercy, they are also at mine because I haven’t paid anything yet.<\/p>\n After they’d gone, I surveyed the ‘new look’ of my garden and the remains of the ’tilleuil’.<\/p>\n With the tree and all the wood debris spread over my garden, things are now looking at their worst. It looks very different without the tree in front of my house but it already looks cleaner and brighter with it gone. <\/p>\n Once everything’s been cleared away and the ‘terrassement’ done to re-contour the ground in front of the house, I’m sure that it’ll look even better. I don’t like having to take down an ancient old tree but the fact was that I had no choice as without doing so, I’d be unable to build the extension I have planned for the front of my house. Taking the tree down signifies the start of that process, and that’s an exciting prospect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Friday morning dawned with a bright, clear blue sky and the silence was shattered by the deafening sound of… birdsong, yet again. No revving of diesel engines, no buzzing of chainsaws. Nothing. I waited until about 10.30 am by which time I’d decided that enough was enough and fired off a one sentence email saying … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10369"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10759,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10369\/revisions\/10759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n