We've had some work done this week on a couple of our trees. The main job was to cut down a leylandii conifer which had grown too tall. We'd been thinking for a while that it needed to go. It was casting a lot of shade across the top of the garden and was taking moisture from the soil around. Trying to grow plants in this dry shade was proving quite difficult.
I was surprised at how quickly the tree came down. I thought about how long it had been in our garden. We'd planted it about 25 years ago, a few years after we'd moved in to the house. It had become a nuisance in recent years and we knew it had to go. But suddenly I became quite sad to lose it. And what about the space left? Well I would have a new planting area, that would be good, I told myself. Once it had gone, I could see sky where it had been. I should have been glad about all that light, but I felt exposed, too open. That's silly, I know, because I'm sure I will love all that extra light when I get used to it. I will be able to grow so much more.
We knew there was an old bird's nest in there and the tree man showed me after the tree had come down. It had been a magpie's nest and it was made up of masses of bits of wire, probably collected from some nearby building work. They seemed to be all wound up together, those magpies must be very skillful.
The tree man cut up some pieces of the trunk for me. My husband is going to hollow them out a bit for me so that I can grow things like sedums in them. This is an idea I got from other gardens we've visited. I also want to use some of the smaller cut up branches to make a bug house and a log pile for wildlife.
The apple tree which you can just about see on the right in this photo was getting a bit squashed by the conifer. It can now be pruned into a better shape, the raspberries will also get more light, so maybe we'll get more fruit from them.
That's plenty of new projects to keep us busy for the next few months.
