It was cold, damp, the wind was blowing and there were fallen leaves everywhere. The trees looked sad. I would guess due to a combination of wind and a lack of water.

Where is summer??!!

On a lighter note I came upon this funny song on my travels. Hope it makes you smile too. I’m actually old enough to remember them, but this particular song had escaped me until now. I just love their use of words and language, for me the video is just a distraction.

Misalliance by Flanders and Swan

To be honest, as much as I disliked the old tree for making mowing so difficult, I did have a certain soft spot for it. A living thing, of great age, struggling to survive against the odds. Sadly sentiment had to be put to one side, it had to go.

It wasn’t our tree anyway, it’s just that it had been gradually falling our way for years so was mostly overhanging our land.

It was a lovely day, so we went out after lunch leaving the 2 young men to their task, and what a task it was. They promised not to leave a mess, and when we got home at teatime we were anxious to see if they had kept their word.

Well they had to a point. Our field had been left very neat and tidy. The trouble was a lot of the ‘smaller’ branches and twigs had just been left in the ditch. So I guess I’ll have to clear it out at some point.

The good thing is the old tree has gone, and it didn’t cost us a penny. Result!

We were just about to set off for a quick grocery shop in the local village when we noticed major activity in the field that adjoins ours.

The two fields are separeated by a drainage ditch. On our side of the ditch there is nothing but grass, on the other there is a selection of trees and hedges, most of which are of a great age. In fact I have written previously about ‘the old tree’ and how it makes cutting the grass more difficult.

Peter went off to investigate.

It turns out the people who own the adjoining field, and have recently had a large part of it fenced pending the arrival of donkeys or ponies, are employing a tree surgeon to tame some of the more unruly inhabitants of the ditch.

This includes cutting down an ancient tree near our compost heap, which we were only commenting on the other day was looking dead.

Pruning the large oak tree next to it, including large branches that over-hang our land.

And finally, remove the ‘old tree’ altogether, which will make my life of grass cutting this summer much easier and far less dangerous.

In short, just about everything we would have wanted doing ourselves, but couldn’t afford. My idea of a good day in February.

Having said that, planted in the right place it can actually look quite spectacular. Take our neighbours place for example.

The previous incumbents used poplar trees to line some of the boundaries of the property. I don’t know exactly when they did this, but today the trees must be 50 feet high.

If you’re looking to make a statement that can be seen for miles around, you could do worse than plant poplar trees. Used in this fashion even I have to admit they are pretty impressive.

Yesterday evening I noticed a small group of starlings gathered in the top most branches, squeezing the last drop of warmth from the winter sun, before it dropped below the horizon.

I also noticed that, despite the high winds we’ve been having which have stripped most of the leaves off most of the trees, the poplars have retained just a handful of leaves right at the very top, just where you’d think it would be windiest.

What’s that about then?

I’m ashamed to say I don’t really know what kind of tree it is, possibly some kind of willow, but I do know that despite it’s great age and poor state, it is still growing vigourously.

Over the years it has dropped lower and lower, branches that at one time I couldn’t reach are now at ground level. The huge trunk is split and each year more and more of it overhangs our field.

Mowing is a nightmare. I’ve lost count of the number of times it’s nearly knocked me off my mower. Doing any work in that particular corner is a real problem. I’m not very tall, but even I should really be wearing a hard hat.

Every so often we attack its lower branches with a saw, loppers and a lot of optomism. Yesterday was such a day. After dinner, quite out of the blue we set about it.

You don’t realise just how big a tree is until you have to cart it away in a wheelbarrow! Peter’s sawing days are really over and he found some of the branches very tricky even with me sitting on them.

Anyway after a couple of hours we did feel to have made some head way, and rewarded ourselves with a sit down and an ice lolly.

Today we are both aching and sore with blisters, nettle stings and bramble scratches from grovelling in the ditch. We’re getting too old for this.

I distributed these among my family and friends, (I’m not quite sure how they must have felt about it) keeping just one for myself. Whilst several of these trees survived into adolescence, some in pots, others in gardens, I’ve lost track of all of them now and suspect they will have gone the way of all flesh. Apart from mine that is.

For many years it grew quite happily in ever bigger pots, and then we moved to a house with a big garden. The previous owner, a man with dubious DIY credentials, had half built  a barbeque between our property and the next door house. We finished the job off with a nice little raised flower bed as we didn’t really want a barbeque. This is why we needed a ton of top soil.

Now, because of the position of the two properties, and the contours of the land, in one corner of this new bed was a sort of self contained planting area, completely surrounded by bricks, stones, concrete and the like, so we decided to put my oak tree in it.

With the benefit of hindsight this might not have been the most sensible place to put it, as it was quite near our house and very near next doors house. We did consider the root situation at the time, but decided the area was so well made there was no way the roots would ever escape or cause any damage.

Sadly our neighbour, an elderly widow, did not share our confidence. She commented on it’s proximity to her property and her fears about it roots. We assured her we would not allow it to cause damage. She was not assured.

I know this because a little while later I began to notice some funny stain marks appearing on the stone around the oak tree. Closer inspection and a keen sense of smell revealed these stains to be bleach. The old bat was pouring bleach on my oak tree, presumably trying to kill it.

Looking back maybe we deserved it, but it would have been nice if she’d tried talking to us again before taking such drastic action. Needless to say neighbourly relations never returned to there pre-bleach level, and I returned my oak tree to its pot and a place of safety.

I didn’t know if it would survive such treatment, but thankfully it did. When we moved here I was finally able to plant it in the ground, and it has rewarded me with a few acorns each year since. We keep it well trimmed and it seems to be very happy in it’s final resting place.

The strong winds of the last few days have not only damaged my onions, but they’ve also shredded the leaves on one side of my lovely little horse chestnut tree. ( I grew it from a conker, so I’m rather fond of it.)

One side of it looks like Spring with fresh green leaves, just what you’d expect. The other side looks like Autumn. Quite bizarre.

At least it’s better than last year when they barely had any flowers on at all. What was that about? Anyway, they’ve made up for it this year, they’re superb.

We bought them, bare rooted, through the post, and they are planted down the side of the vegetable garden. Considering how small they were when they came, they are lovely big trees now.

The euonymous planted in flower beds one and two are looking splendid too. We’ve got a golden and green one and a cream and green one, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten their Sunday names, but they really do look good. The gold one next to the pink leaves of the spirea looks particularly striking.

In an attempt to prevent my new weeding technique from failing before it gets started, I re-weeded flower bed one today. Then I moved on to the side of the house where I rarely go. This is where I tried to grow the foxgloves, and to my surprise there are quite a few, also some cowslips which I’dforgotten about. What a lovely surprise.

    

]]> http://ravendalehouse.com/2009/04/14/cherry-trees/feed/ 0 http://ravendalehouse.com/2009/01/24/trees/ http://ravendalehouse.com/2009/01/24/trees/#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:03:25 +0000 Cloudybutnice http://ravendalehouse.com/?p=155 I love trees, I don’t know why, perhaps it’s their great size or longevity, I just know I’ve always been intrigued by them. I can remember as a child sowing apple pips, orange pips, acorns, conkers, sycamore keys and the like just to see what I could grow.

Needless to say my success rate was pretty poor, particularly with the fruit, though I do know I once managed to grow a sycamore and an oak tree just outside the back door of the kitchen. To my horror these were pulled up by our neighbour, (as I later found out with my dad’s permission) whilst we were away on holiday one year. I never quite forgave either of them for that, though I can see now why they did.

This arboreal fascination has stayed with me into adulthood and I continued to sow things I found. My technique must have improved because soon I found myself with several small trees in pots. One horsechestnut, a couple each of sycamore, rowan, beech and laburnum, plus numerous oak trees. These were joined later by two scots pines donated by my sister. I lovingly potted them up each year until I couldn’t realistically go any further, and so that’s how they stayed for year after year, in pots.

When we bought this house, it was always our intention to plant some trees, but we didn’t actually want to plant a wood and we wanted a wider species variety than I could provide from my collection. We planted the beeches, scots pines, one rowan, the horsechestnut and a couple of oaks, but all the rest were spare, about a dozen trees in all. I continued to care for these spare trees, but it was obvious they weren’t going to thrive or prosper stuck in their pots.

To cut a long story short, my sister and her husband decided to move to Scotland, and whilst they were house hunting they made friends with a couple, who did want to plant a wood. It wasn’t long before my trees were travelling with my sister all the way to Scotland, where they were planted out by her friends and the last I heard they were thriving. I was so pleased that at long last they had found a proper home.

Back in our garden, we spent a long time planning the tree planting and choosing which ones to buy. We decided to get them by mail order, I think we ordered about 75 in total, but that did included a lot of small beech plants for making a small hedge around the garage. I can still remember the day they arrived, the van pulled up and we were handed a long thin parcel, we waited for him to give us the next one and the next, but that was it, all our trees were in this small tube. We were amazed, not to say a little worried.

Looking at them now many years later, it’s hard to believe they were once so small. A few didn’t make it, we’re quite exposed here, but the majority did, and the sense of pleasure I get from watching the birds fly in and among them is just immense. Imagine if you will the day they make a nest in one for the first time, I’ll just be made up.

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