As you can imagine, I spend an extraordinary amount of time looking at trees. I look at them when I’m quoting, I look at them while I’m working on them and because it’s hard to stop I look at them pretty much every other second I’m outside too. So much so that I’m sure my family are running a secret bingo game with phrases like “Look at that fungus”, “I wonder why that’s done that” and “why would you top a Birch” coming up the most often.
Even with this compulsive behaviour, every now and then you come across a tree that really surprises you. This was one of them.
We got a phone call asking to take a look at removing a Beech, in Copmanthorpe, with a TPO (Tree Preservation Order) on it. I started up with the usual warnings about our understanding of the council’s view on mature TPO trees. Turns out I was wasting my breath. It had a bad case of Meripilus (a fungal root rot) and the tree officer had already been out and condemned it. Meripilus can be really tricky, the canopy can be full of leaf (as this one was), showing no overt signs of ill health and then bang. The roots give up the ghost and down it comes.
The homeowner had tried to warn me over the phone about the height of the tree and it was certainly tall for a backyard tree at roughly 24m but it was the size of the trunk, that shocked me. The bottom 8m or so of the stem was 4-5ft across. It was a behemoth. The access certainly wasn’t bad especially for York but there was no way to get a big truck or tractor close enough to move it in one big piece. Which would mean the only option is to cut it all up into ‘moveable’ 10 inch rings and move them one at a time. Though even then each of those pieces are likely to be over 200kg each and probably closer to 350kg. Fortunately when we came to remove it, we brought with us a skidsteer, as otherwise it would have been back breaking work.
It was Freddie who was called up to climb and strip the canopy off it. Again because of the Meripilus, we wanted to do lots of small cuts rather than sending out huge pieces. This not only was easier for the team on the ground but it reduced the risk of disturbing the compromised root system too much. From a narrative point of view, I’d really like to have a couple of problems that we had to overcome, with hard work and ingenuity or maybe a couple of near misses. Fortunately for the job and unfortunately for the story, Freddie is exceedingly good and the most drama we had out of him, was demolishing the biscuits at break. By 3pm Freddie was back on the ground, two loads of woodchip had gone to York Sports Club for their woodland section and the once monstrous tree was down to a pole.
Then it was just a case of felling it, which granted was a little easier said than done. The stem had a slight lean towards the house and with the weight of the timber left standing it took a lot of winching to over come. But down it came all the same, leaving us with just a lot of tidy up to do. This is where bringing the skidsteer along saved a lot of sweat, tears and backache. The timber ended up going to a few different uses, the homeowner kept as much as they could handle for firewood
