I posted last week about a huge old oak tree in the back yard of Schloss Bodissey that fell down during a thunderstorm.
I found a guy who was willing to cut it up and haul it out of there. He wants the wood, so he’s doing it free of charge. He’s just leaving the small branches behind to be chipped up by the other tree man. Then a third guy will come in to grind up the stump.
After his first session, enough space had been cleared back there for me to be able to walk around the surviving oak tree and assess its condition from directly below. When the other tree fell, it broke several major branches off the surviving tree as it came down. They were all on the east side of the tree, which afterwards had almost no foliage left on that side. In the highest part of the tree, all the remaining branches were on the west side, overhanging the house. If that tree had fallen during a storm, it would almost certainly have at least clipped the corner of the Eyrie — which is where I’m sitting right now — as it fell.
There was no way to avoid it: the tree had to come down.
Early this morning the tree man took it down using his bucket truck. It was an impressive operation. I watched him up there in the bucket, lopping off pieces at the top of the tree and dropping them down into the yard where his assistant could pick them up and move them out of the way. Then he got to the upper section of the trunk, and cut it into short sections, dropping them right under the bucket, each landing with a deep WHUMP. Finally he tied a rope around the top of the remaining trunk and anchored it to the bucket truck. He did the standard two cuts at the base to get the tree to fall in the desired direction, and down it came. I was taking photos of the operation, and caught the split second just before the trunk hit the ground:
That was taken through the back door. The one below was taken about three seconds later, through the storm door:
All those big dangerous heavy pieces came down and dug holes in the yard when they hit, but they never touched the pump house or the roof of the house. The guy knows what he’s doing.
Now I have a big, empty, bright, HOT space in my back yard, which is essentially shadeless, as you can see from the photo at the top of this post. It used to be that the pump house was shaded from both sides, and the whole back yard was shady during the middle of the day in summertime.
When I stood back from the house and looked at it from the east, it looked kind of like a new house that has just been built on a bare empty lot. Very disconcerting.
And very, VERY traumatic. I find it hard to describe my feelings at this point.
There are thunderstorms headed this way right now, so it’s a good thing the tree is gone. I’m experiencing serious trauma at the moment, but it would be nothing compared with the trauma of having a badly damaged roof back here.
I’m counting my blessings.
A near run thing, as Wellington said after Waterloo.
That second picture with the guy standing next to the felled tree gives you an idea of how big that thing really was. And you certainly don’t want something like that to come crashing down on your roof.
A tree is a marvellous thing. You can chop it up and use it for firewood, you can mill it and use it to build furniture, houses and a hundred other products. And the best thing of all is that another tree will grow back up and take its place after you’ve cut it down. These things are the true renewables.
I guess a tree unexpectedly coming down in a storm marks the end of an era, but that is life I guess. Everything has to come to an end eventually. That’s just the way this old world of ours work.
Having cut up a fair number of oak trees with chainsaw and split the resulting rounds with wedge and maul I can appreciate just how heavy they are and how dangerous downing one can be.
My father and I cut one down once for a friend and it was about half again as big as yours. My father did the felling, and after it was down he cut one of the projecting limbs but as it was cut through the remaining tree was unbalanced and rolled and another limb brushed over his head giving him a moderate cut and a nice lump for his inattention. He was lucky it didn’t brain him.
You’re right about what a traumatic gap it leaves when a large tree is felled. Its a perfect metaphor for life really. You live in the shadow of a large tree year after year, enjoying its shade and beauty, but mostly taking its existence for granted. And it is only when it is gone that you realize how much you had come to rely upon it’s existence or can realize the magnitude of the loss that comes with its passing.
Well, I never took those two trees for granted. Every time I looked out back I thanked the Lord for them, and dreaded the day when they were no longer there, which I knew would come, and which now has.
There were actually three big oak trees back there originally. The third one had clearly grown back from a stump many decades before, and had three trunks growing up from the same root. After two of those parts fell down during ice storms, I had the third one cut down, to make sure it wouldn’t hit the house. But that was almost forty years ago, so the other two trees have presided over the back yard for most of the time I’ve been here.
Thanks for sharing your story, and photos, baron. I hope you feel better soon…lots of emotions.
While I sympathize with your feelings of loss, I am still glad that you took down the dangerous tree. You literally could have been killed which has happened in my NY community a few times.
Most recently, just a few years ago during one of our 100 year storms, a huge oak tree fell unexpectedly on a nearby house, killing a young boy who lived there. The small house was nearly destroyed as well.
Around here, the rich people simply buy new trees. I have seen them truck in fairly large replacement trees which they then have planted by guys using backhoes and heavy duty equipment.
Maybe that’s something you can do.
Maybe we can start a Baron’s Tree Fund here at the Gates.
Thank you. The future Baron and I will plant some new trees (and it’s mostly for him), but we won’t do any major excavation so close to the well. That pump house sits on top of an old hand-dug well, which was later extended another thirty feet down by drilling. It’s about five feet in diameter, dug through red clay. I can’t risk causing a collapse down there.
I would get that thing milled up into lumber, decent sized logs
If they were white oak you could sell them to barrel makers who are having a hard
time finding white oak these days for some really good bourbon?
One of them is a red oak, the one that hollowed out and fell. I’m not sure about the other one.
Four guys came early this morning and did some serious cutting. Most of the wood from both trees is cut up now into pieces of manageable size, for firewood.
Such a shame.
London has more parks than the average large city (thanks largely to our royal family, who owned several of them).
I’m lucky to live next to one of the smaller ones, Kennington Park, just south of Elephant and Castle for those who know the city. It was laid out in the 1860s, and has many mature trees probably dating from then. There’s also a smallish apartment block from the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Palace, supposedly built by Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert as a model of “ideal housing for the industrious working classes” and rebuilt here. Apparently it was copied in several European cities, but not here.
More sadly, there’s also a memorial to over 100 civilians, mostly women and children, killed by a Luftwaffe bomb in a shallow shelter.