let there be light

This morning the pole lopper was out again, this time to trim a conifer growing in a friend's front garden.  She had got home from work to find a letter from the council warning her that she had two weeks to clear the overgrowth from around the street light in front of her house, otherwise she would face a fine.  I must admit that my initial reaction when she told me about the letter was What street light? which suggested that maybe the conifer was rather in the way.  There again, if I go round to her house I drive there, and if it is dark I have my headlights on, so I wouldn't really notice street lamps either way.

Removing the conifers completely has been on her list of things to do, but if her list is even half as long as mine it's no wonder that paying a tree surgeon to come and cut them down might not have made it to the top.  We have talked about the conifers in the past, and how much lighter the front garden would be if the trees were not there, and the extra space that would be freed up, but still, hiring reputable arborists is not cheap.  Lots of people will post fliers through your door, but do you really want to sign up to have work done on the basis of a verbal offer from somebody with only a first name and a mobile number, and no address or verifiable insurance details?  My friend didn't.  We wouldn't either, though fliers don't often make it all the way up the farm track to our front door.

I agreed it would be a sensible holding measure if I went round with the pole lopper and took off as much greenery as possible, to make it look as though she was doing her best to do something until she could get a tree surgeon in to complete the job.  The lopper can't cut through anything more than an inch in diameter, and barely an inch nowadays if the wood is hard or old, but the offending conifer branches were mostly young and soft.  They came bouncing down across me and the pavement, while my friend scurried around collecting them up and keeping an eye out for cars and pedestrians.  I started by removing the foliage that was actually growing out in front of the lamp (we had to admit that the council had a point) and worked down and outwards in a sort of cone, to allow the light to fall on as wide a section of pavement as possible.

My friend is a lecturer in psychology who has recently done some research into office workers' perception of light and sound levels, while I read psychology at university in the dim and distant past.  Take one PhD and one graduate in psychology and set them to work clearing a street lamp, and it rapidly becomes a case study in perception.  We agreed that what we needed to do address was not so much the absolute level of light reaching the street, as the perceived level of obstruction in the mind of whoever it was who had complained about the street lamp to the council.  To that end I carefully cut away as much as I could reach of the twigs above and behind the lamp, even though all they were doing was cutting down the light pollution emitted into space, until the lamp stood with a clear halo of sky around it.  With the bit between my teeth I went on trimming branches that overhung the pavement even at some distance from the light and after my friend had told me that I could probably stop now.  I didn't stop at the conifer.  Overhanging pieces of privet and cotoneaster got the chop as well, since my friend said they were all going in the long run anyway.  My theory was that they made the pavement feel hemmed in, and that it would seem lighter if there was less greenery overhead, even if the street light wasn't shining directly on that bit of pavement.

By the time we'd finished we'd filled three council green waste bags, and it certainly looked as though she had made an effort.  With any luck it will be enough to hold the council at bay until she can get a tree surgeon in to do a proper job.