Saturday 19 September 2009

Down at the bottom of the garden...

One of the (admittedly several) reasons we fell in love with the house was the field and row of trees at the bottom of the gardens on our section of the road (our road being an L-shape most of the residents are unlucky enough to back on to other houses).

The trees block the view of the houses on the other side of the field (except in winter), provide us with squirrels, birds, insects and lots of little tree seedlings. Mostly these are norway maples and we have a lovely little collection in pots at the moment.



Unfortunately they seem to do better when they haven't been moved, like this one growing in the gravel next to the house wall. Unfortunately it's going to have to be dug up before the builder arrives in a couple of weeks to put in french doors and I don't like our chances of extracting its roots.



We're very lucky in that some of the trees directly backing onto our garden are elms. Although there is actually an Exeter elm my father ruled that out when trying to identify them and they remain unidentified. Three of the trees at the bottom are dead. I assume that they are elms, but confess have never tried to identify them. Unfortunately one keeled over in the wind and landed on our back fence a few days ago.



Luckily the tree is not too heavy and didn't bring down the fence that Ian and my father put up last year.

Technically the removal of the tree is a job for the council, but our council are a little 'chain-saw-happy' and I fear that they would remove a lot more than just this tree if we called them in. The slow worm family also live around the roots of the tree so we'll have to be very careful when dealing with it.

3 comments:

Scriptor Senex said...

Glad the fence survived. Looks like the Ivy may have precipitated this one's fallinbg. Perhaps an axe to some of the ivy on the other elms might delay their falling if they die off. Mind you, it's all a question of balance because then the slow worms would lose some of their ceover.

Graham Edwards said...

Luck it wasn't one of the big ones!

Ian said...

... among the birds and the bees ...

Did anyone else recognise the title song?!

Maybe we need to saw the tops off the dead trees and plant in some new hedging?