Friday, July 15, 2016

Fell

Today

My garden at Spencer House is full of trees. Some are specimens, planted by the Victorian designers of the Manor, others are self-seeded and now grown to massive proportions. The oak tree threatens the stability of the garage and the beech once again is touching the roof of the house and brushing against the windows. My poor ash has die-back, with new growth failing to put out leaves. So, they all need a prune and some have just got to go, something I'm a little sorry about.

In My Day

4BH was also a Victorian house with a large garden bordered with trees, as I have before blogged. There were all beautiful, especially the copper beech. But most had been there for about a hundred years and it's only oaks and yews that grow for three hundred years +; most reach the end of their life in seventy to a hundred years. And some were huge - the limes at the front were almost as tall as the house which was a four-storey dwelling.

So there was always the possibility that a tree would come crashing down without warning. I remember two instances of this. 

The first was when the laburnum in the front garden came down under the weight of snow on December 30th 1962. This was early in the great winter of 62/63. The tree simply subsided and fell right across the main road. Traffic (including buses) was backed up in both directions. It was a Sunday, so no chance of getting help. Instead a huge family effort was initiated, with Daddy and the boys slicing up branches and the trunk and the rest of us wheeling away logs in wheelbarrows in the still falling snow. I had just come home from a massively extended (on account of the snow) paper round and was pretty tired, but had to knuckle down and help.

On another occasion a large maple at the back just silently collapsed across the lawn. There was a pram  in the back garden (was it Beatrice's?),  although empty. Daddy shoved it a bit closer to the tree, took a dramatic picture and sent it to the local paper with an equally dramatic fictional news item all about close shaves and lucky near misses. I learnt a lot about journalism that day.

I shall be most sorry to lose both oak and ash at the same time as I always enjoyed watching to see which one would come into leaf first and prove or disprove the old saying.

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