Well, I've done it. The great tree that dominates my garden is an almost
leafless skeleton, less than three quarters of its former 120ft height. I
have given the monster the forty whacks, or 400 coups, it cried out for.
Tonnes of wood were hefted from my garden and rendered into sawdust by a
great whirring machine. It was dramatic, radical, brutal. From my study
window I can now see the wide blue sky or the racing clouds - things you
miss when your view is overwhelmed by a wilful, egocentric, ever-expanding
tree.
I love trees as much as anyone. Twelve per cent of Britain is woodland, and
the landscape would be drear indeed without forests and copses. I love the
spreading cedars on Hampstead Heath, and venerate its fantastically gnarled
old oaks, field maples, red-berried rowans, hornbeams, avenues of limes, the
“famous magnolia” in front of Kenwood House. Such trees are magnificent,
essential to wide-open spaces. But in what estate agents call the leafy
suburbs, towering limes and chestnuts have ceased to know their place. They
grow too big for their boots, or roots.
Dr David Hessayon, who sells millions of gardening books, writes in his volume
on trees: “The tragedy is that all too often a woodland giant is planted in
a small garden. This is the sorry tale of the weeping willow and the horse
chestnut, the copper beech and the large-leaved lime. The problem is that we
become sentimentally attached to the tree we planted ten or more years ago
and so we leave it to cast its deep shade over windows, flower beds and the
neighbour's garden.” How true. An overgrown tree in a garden has a darkening
effect on the spirits. Looming over an average 100ft suburban plot it forms
a permanent cloud. Near windows, it turns day to night.
Who wants to switch on electric lights in summer? My bugbear is a black poplar
(populus nigra, or Salicaceae), not to be confused with the tall, elegant,
columnar Lombardy variety. A black poplar is not black, though black has
been the colour of my thoughts about it. It is a quite rare native English
tree, tenacious and vigorous, with great sprawling branches. In March it
sprouts catkins like lambs' tails, which fall in June, and then unseasonably
red leaves appear before they turn a shivery green, in dense masses, which
will in October cascade down, carpeting the lawn and causing at least six
weekends' worth of raking, bagging and cursing.
Dr Hessayon is frank in his warning about the poplar - “not a plant for the
small garden” - which he says grows more quickly than almost any other tree,
reaching 80ft in less than 20 years. “Their roots can damage drains, raise
paving stones and undermine foundations. The branches can be a hazard when
they fall.”
I remember my first meeting with my tree, when we bought the house in 1981. On
a hot June day, the outgoing owner held a picnic beneath its shade. The tree
was then aged about 85, I suppose, the same age as the house and, although
large, did not appear threatening. And it helped to block the view of the
1970s houses across the grass courts of the neighbouring tennis club.
Two years later the tennis club asked us to trim the overhanging branches:
that cost £220. Four years later, on that dark October night of the great
storm of 1987, two massive limbs fell across the garden. The resulting
supply of logs was a small consolation for the £300 cost that year. And so
began a spiral of expense that has been the Monster Tree's contribution to
domestic outgoings ever since.
In 1990 our next-door neighbour complained that overhanging branches stopped
not just sunlight but rainwater from reaching his herbaceous borders. We
duly had a third pruning done. I have kept the invoices, so I can log the
soaring cost of maintenance ever since: £580 in 1992. £720 in 1996. £980 in
1999. In those days we employed a tree surgeon of taciturn but poetic bent,
a true artist: he was reverent about trees and therefore took care to leave
them looking not much different from the way they were before. His team of
agile “monkeys” were often London firemen moonlighting - or, rather,
daylighting - and took four days to complete the job. By 2001 the estimate
for the poplar was £1,135, at which I balked: but in 2002 I caved in, by
which time the cost was £1,240.
Just two years later its branches had reached upward another 20ft. A crown
reduction cost £2,800, which included £460 for removal of rampant ivy but
did not include the £300 I had to pay for scaffolding (at the tree surgeon's
insistence) to protect the new summerhouse I had recently installed below.
The last estimate from this chap was in 2005: for a 40 per cent reduction in the canopy, one metre above the old pollard points, and reshaping the whole:
£3,400. Across the top of this I wrote in red felt-tip “Is this a joke?” and
found a new tree surgeon, appropriately named Woods, who came alone, worked
for a week in a sort of cradle, lowering each branch gently to the ground,
required no scaffolding, and charged £2,000. But by the summer of 2007 there
was again a shadow over my summerhouse, and no view of sky.
This spring I called Mr Tomlinson of Tomlinson Tree Surgeons. He estimated
£2,110 for the poplar, applied for the necessary permission from the council
(which takes six weeks) and, when the appointed day arrived, he sent along
Lee Durasow of Orange Trees. I told Lee that elegant or tentative pruning
would not be enough this time. I wanted sky, and light.
Slung about with a harness laden with tools and several small handsaws, he
shinned up the tree at fantastic speed. His stamina and skill were
astonishing. He hung there, 80ft up, for four hours at a stretch, sometimes
upside down, sawing and pruning, shouting down to make sure nobody was below
as he dropped a branch. Two assistants in hard hats remained on the ground
to lug the branches to the street and winch up bottles of water on a rope
for the boss (it was the hottest two days of the year - 28C).
Thanks to Lee's deft aim, the summerhouse remained intact and only a single
hollyhock was broken. After the first day's work I could hardly look at the
decimation that had occurred. But three weeks later, something extraordinary
has happened: I have grown accustomed to the sparseness of the tree, and
enjoy its naked muscularity - I can see that it is a fine shape, seven
symmetrical poles forming a perfectly rounded crown. Mirabile dictu, I have
even started to love that tree again.
Lee said I was a typical client. All tree-owners regale him with tales of woe
about labour-intensive autumn leaves: they have come to hate their trees
because of it. Then they watch the pruning operation begin and express
horrified alarm - nervous of the inexorable destruction that has been set in
motion, with no turning back. (“It's like having your portrait painted,”
said Lee. “You appoint an artist to do it, but you've no idea how it will
turn out.”) But by the end of the day, he said, he always becomes the
tree-owner's best friend. Clients are awash with relief and gratitude for
the light he has restored. On his laptop he showed me before-and-after and
one-year-after pictures of trees he has pruned, including several outside
Westminster Abbey, and at Windsor Castle.
There are so many houses in my area of North London - a sprawl of well-built
red-brick Victorian homes with large windows - which are now quite invisible
to passers-by, obliterated by up to half a dozen enormous trees crammed into
the front garden. I marvel that the inhabitants can bear to live in a
year-round valley of the shadow of death. New small blocks of postmodern
flats built a decade ago tended to feature little ironwork balconies, now
rendered useless for sitting out on or planting flowers, because of the
unrestrained trees blotting out the sunlight.
Yes, Lee said, trees in suburbs outgrow their environment. Trees and hedges
are the commonest cause of bitter disputes between neighbours, as roots
crack driveways and patios, and Leylandii cut out light.
But objecting to someone's tree or hedge is like complaining about their
children: it rankles. People get proprietorial or sentimental about them.
Wrangles constantly fetch up in court. A friend living nearby had to move
out of his house for two months this year while underpinning took place.
Huge cracks had appeared in the walls of his house, and drains were blocked,
by the roots of his neighbour's walnut tree. Even then, the neighbour
refused to have the tree cut down - because it had been planted to mark the
birth of their firstborn 40 years before.
Are we mad? The Victorians' plane trees, lovely in themselves, have damaged
the water table of the clay soil in London, and now smother windows
everywhere. A fashionable eucalyptus may have looked pretty when planted in
the 1970s, but it will try to reach 150ft. All politicians like to woo their
electorate by planting trees, and get photographed wielding a shovel: Boris
Johnson did it as soon as he became mayor, on some barren housing estate.
But just wait a decade or two.
Planning bodies would never allow an additional storey to be added to a
building every few years, yet we allow trees to grow and grow until they
tower over the houses they once adorned. All householders need reminding
that trees have to be managed. A tree surgeon, like a human surgeon, prefers
to preserve, prolong and strengthen life. They do not relish cutting down
trees. However, as Lee reminded me, the more trees are pruned, the more they
continue to need pruning, so arboriculturalists have no shortage of work: he
will have to come back in three years' time. I had better start saving now.
In the meantime I shall enjoy those precious - and, this summer, rather rare
- evenings when I can once more sit at the bottom of the garden and watch
the sun go down.
Before you axe, learn the facts...
Local planning authorities have the power to list trees, whether in a public
space or private garden, under the Town and Country Planning Act (Part VIII)
1990.
Trees are issued with Tree Protection Orders. Before axeing a tree you must
ask your local planning authority whether it is under an order, which would
prohibit you from pruning it or chopping it down.
If you break an order, the local authority can make you plant a replacement
tree; if taken to court you could be fined up to £20,000.
You may apply for consent from the planners to carry out work on a protected
tree. This can take up to eight weeks; you may need written evidence from a
tree surgeon.
Even if your tree isn't covered by an order, it may be protected if you live
in a conservation area, so consult the planners at least six weeks before
you plan to do any work. If you are concerned about a tree on a property
that you hope to buy, ask your solicitor to do a search of the local land
charges register to see whether it is protected.
To protect a tree in your local area or in a neighbouring garden, you must
apply to the local authority for it to be put under a Tree Preservation
Order. The owners and other interested parties have 28 days to object.
And if you want to give your neighbour's tree the chop...
There is no right to light in English law but if you think your neighbour's
tree could damage your property, you can appeal to your local authority. It
has the power to remove it and will recover the costs from your neighbour.
If your neighbour's tree hangs over your property, you can cut off the
overhanging branches. Any branches and fruit removed must be returned to the
tree's owner. It is illegal to enter your neighbour's property to fell a
tree.
