Friday 8 June 2012

an ill wind

I came downstairs this morning to find the light on the answering machine flashing.  That is never a good sign.  Nobody ever rings us about anything nice before nine in the morning.  If it were good news it would have kept until later, or they'd have sent an e-mail, or a text.  Answer machine messages first thing mean trouble, sudden illness, cancelled arrangements, something bad.  This one turned out to be moderately bad, as it was the neighbours from the far end saying that our extremely large tree was down in their garden.  I went back upstairs to break the bad news to the Systems Administrator, who was still asleep after a work reunion in London the evening before.

The damage, at first sight, was not as bad as it might have been.  A poplar was lying wind-thrown along the line of their hedge, resting in places on the hedge, and unfortunately going through the middle of what had been a nice little rowan, until another tree ten times its size landed on it.  There were some branches hanging over their garden, but it hadn't reached their greenhouse, or touched any structure.  There were no smashed pots or ornaments.  And nobody was dead.

The tree looked perfectly healthy, with normal sized leaves right to the end of every twig.  The boss's mantra at work is that die-back that starts on the outside of a tree and at the top must be taken seriously, but it didn't look as though we'd been negligent owners overlooking obvious problems with this tree.  It was growing along the edge of the ditch, and it seemed as though a combination of saturated soil and a summer gale hitting it when it was in full leaf had been too much for it to cope with.  The root plate lay up-ended, at ninety degrees to the ground.  End of poplar.

The Systems Administrator sent me home to start ringing round for an arborist to get the main trunk out of the hedge and the rowan.  If it had been all on our property we'd have done it ourselves, slowly, in stages, but in somebody else's garden we were keen to minimise further collateral damage, in the interests of neighbourly relations, and because unlike a professional tree firm we don't have any insurance for cutting up large trees in other people's gardens.  I tried a local chap, that we've never used before but know of via a neighbour who has worked for him in the past, and to my astonishment he said he could look at the problem today, as he'd be passing.  The SA reappeared at home, having tried to placate the neighbour, and we set out with the truck (once I'd cleared the remaining bags of mushroom compost off the back), loppers, saw and chainsaw, to show willing by removing the light debris from the garden.

The neighbour seemed reassured that something was happening quickly, and even gave us cups of tea, and we made polite conversation for a few minutes without her complaining any more about the fallen tree, and me not remarking that it was funny how after she'd told me that they weren't using our spinney as a dump for prunings or mowings, sawn off branches from a Magnolia grandiflora had appeared in it at just the same time that one disappeared from her garden.  We chopped off and carried away the branches in her border, that weren't carrying any weight, which filled the back of the truck, and went home and emptied those on to the concrete and went back with a lawn rake and some large buckets and raked the small twigs off the lawn, and pulled little tufts of poplar out of her shrubs and off her borders.  The borders had been very nicely mulched with compost, which I remembered had been dumped in our spinney, but I regret to say that somebody had tied the leaves of the daffodils in knots.  You really aren't supposed to do that.

We removed a few broken twigs and stems from her plants while we were at it, on the grounds that they weren't very damaged, and she would notice it less if she couldn't see the broken bits.  Most of the plants were OK, even a little bed of African marigolds that appeared unscathed from under the chaos, but one small strawberry tree seemed to be completely obliterated.  I found bits of it while I was picking up twigs, and then the SA finished clearing that area, and afterwards there was no trace of the Arbutus at all.  By then our neighbour had gone out, so I rang as soon as we got home and left a message promising to get her a new one on Monday, on the grounds that it was only fair, and prompt offer of restitution might help fend off vengeful claims for more substantial compensation.  The SA did at my prompting take photographs of the tree before we started clearing up, and again afterwards, so that we could prove the extent of the damage, or lack of it, and the reasonableness of our belief that the tree was in good health right up to the point where it fell over.

I love trees, but sometimes I wish that they could love me back a bit, instead of falling on things inconveniently.  However, it could have been much worse, and we are not alone in our troubles.  I saw in the paper that the second day of The Suffolk Show had to be cancelled on safety grounds, after some of the tents blew down in the night, and given that the wind was forecast to increase through the day.  The plant centre had a stand in the floral area this year, and the boss is on the organising committee.  All that effort preparing for the show has been half wasted, so they will be spitting, not to mention all the would-be show visitors, caught in the resulting gigantic and confusing traffic jam and wondering if they're going to get refunds.

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