Removing another cherry tree

A friend needed a cherry tree removing from a garden. I'd not seen him in years, I'd not met his wife and helping him out seemed like the kind of thing friends do. Plus, I get to do a dismantle...

Context and the sad stuff.

Neil has been my friend since the late eighties. We were both skateboarders who lived within a mile of each other in a South Shields – a medium sized coastal town in the North East of England. In the early 2000’s he moved to Thailand and in that time I’ve seen him once. Sadly, Neil’s mother passed at the start of December 2023 and so he and his wife returned to the UK to do all of the things that adults must do when their parents pass away. One of those things is dealing with the estate.

Treework can, on very rare occasions, be surprisingly emotional. One of the things that gets me on jobs at treecompany during jobs for widows, is the reminder that men typically die before women¹. There are a lot of jobs that I do at treecompany where a hedge or tree that was planted by a now deceased husband is left unmaintained. It is understandable. If I was widow I can easily see how I’d not want to touch or alter anything my now deceased husband grew and cared for.

The tree

Neil’s garden had a few trees that had been allowed to become outgrown, but one in particular was the target of my saws. A cherry.

This cherry tree was about twenty feet tall and had well outgrown the space it was allocated.

Cherry trees, as I have written about before, tend to get very pronounced surface roots. Here the roots became so pronounced that the fence had been removed to accommodate them and it had lifted the concrete slabs up by six inches. I know those slabs used to be level because we used to skate on them back in the day when the cherry tree hadn’t been planted.

The fence had been removed or built around the roots. The roots had put on enough girth to lift the concrete slabs and you can see evidence that the slab was cracking.

Hazards, Zones & Site.

Fibre Optic Line

I didn’t spot from the photo that Neil sent me was the fact that there was a BT fibre optic line running through the trees edge. I’ve worked a few jobs where we’ve had to deal with overhead lines, but always as a groundie. This time I was the climber (and the groundie) and so it was up to me to not break that line. If I did, there’s a minimum charge of £1000 to get it fixed. As this was a freebie good deed for a friend and knowing full well that no good deed goes unpunished, I did not want to break that line.

Every roof surface

All of the buildings in the garden had been roofed with plastic sheeting which was very brittle after being exposed to UV for ten or more years. It was also -5º celcius which didn’t help matters at all. My controls for these hazards were simply “be mindful, accurate and don’t break anything”. My hoop was a bit twitchy.

Drop Zone

This drop zone is the area in which you can drop stuff. This may have been the smallest drop zone I’ve worked on anywhere. It was about one metre wide and all in all and surrounded by fragile roofing and lined on the north boundary by a nice expensive fibre optic line.

Not a lot of space to drop things here. As I found out during the day, I was mostly dropping stuff on the camera.

It was also a cold day. I was on the coast, up a tree and absolutely feeling the -5º windchill. One bonus however was the view. I could see both the sea and my old childhood bedroom from the top of this tree. I dream about that bedroom at least once every month. Seeing it in real life always increases the frequency of those dreams.

Dismantling the tree

The last time I did a solo dismantle on a cherry tree, I had not started working at treecompany. Since then, I’ve worked on about fifty removals now from the point of view of a groundie. I’m always watching how the climbers do it and I’ve been itching to do a removal of my own for a while, especially on something that required climbing.

Whilst I do now own a nice truck capable of towing a large trailer or chipper, I don’t currently have either a chipper or a trailer. In the last cherry tree job I hacked around this by putting the brash into dumpy bags. I got mocked for this approach at treeschool but hey - a solution is a solution. So, with glee, the plan for this job was to once again to put all of the brash into dumpy bags and mash it up with a saw. Neil was going to take it to the tip.

However, as I turned up at Neil’s place I noticed a guy with an arb truck and chipper doing a hedge. Words were spoken, hands were shaken and we’d managed to upgrade from brash in a dumpy bag, to brash being chipped and taken away. The guy was called Gareth Shepard (or Gaz) and he runs a tree business called NE Tree that operates in and around South Shields. The planets aligned for me and Neil in this regard. I’m not sure Neil understood how much of a bullet he dodged – but I did.

Aside from the tiny drop zone and hazards, this dismantle was actually straight forward. I could access the tree with ease, it was an easy climb and I could use my silky (a handsaw) for nearly every branch cut. I prefer using the silky because it is so peaceful. Small trees like this one are an ideal one to develop your climbing skills because almost straight away you’re anchoring into branches that are on the limit of what you can safely anchor (wrist thickness). You have to pay attention to where and how you’re anchoring and where possible anchor around two more branches. It would be exactly the same at the top of a twenty five metre monster broadleaf, only it would feel less safe because of the distance between you and the ground.

I did have to come down after a while to drag the brash out into the street so that Gaz could chip it, but that’s a small price to pay to get rid of brash. I was then back up and removing branches again. Here’s some video snap shots to give you an idea of the approach. With the exception of one cut, everything was removed with my silky.

Cut your way up, cut your way around then cut your way down. Easy.

Gaz made the day much easier by performing groundie duties. He dragged, chipped and sent me up the stuff I needed. I cannot tell you how much being able to move the brash off site with ease (either by truck or trailer) assists when doing this kind of work. If I’m being honest, it is the most valuable part to a customer. The second most valuable thing we’ll get to a little later on. Before I move on, let me express my gratitude towards Gaz once more - 🙏

So once, you’ve got the branches and limbs off, it is just a case off chopping chunks (we call them chogs in the North East of England - pronounced like chips) off and throwing them down. This act is called “chogging” and you’re aiming to make a stick that is just small enough to fit into the space you have to fell it. This job had a tiny drop zone and felling anything wasn’t on the cards. Every part of the stem had to be chogged.

Chogging.

One thing with chogging is that you’re removing all of the places you could place your feet and for this reason, you would typically always wear spikes when chogging down a stem. However, I made a newbie error on this job and I didn’t bring my climbing spikes. So, I had to do the unthinkable and use a chainsaw from a ladder.

I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking the exact same thing – every fail video on the internet concerning chainsaws and trees would tell you to never to do this. HOWEVER, in my defence I was using the ladder as a positioning device². My lanyard and ropes had all of my weight. I also made sure to strap the ladder in place so that it couldn’t move. Risk assessment people, risk assessment.

For anyone still thinking this is dodgy, here is what the Arboricultural Association technical guidance one (short name TG1) has to say about using ladders as a platform for work:

Section 7: Strategy for access

…

7.6.3 – Where a ladder is used as a means of providing a temporary platform for work, the climber must be secured to the tree and the ladder secured to stop it moving.

Check and check. Move on people, this use of ladders was completely legit.

The Cleanup

And then you’re at this point.

I made mention to the second most valuable thing to a customer regarding tree removal. It is this stage, the cleanup. Tree work is very messy - especially where chainsaws are involved. Not only are there a lot of small little twigs littering the place, but there’s “the heavy” (the collective term for chogs), the chip or brash (Gaz sorted this for me) and then the saw dust. In the above photo you can see the heavy, the twigs and the dust. All of which is in no kind of order.

This is the part of the job I don’t relish but it has to be done. It is in all likelihood the thing that the customer remembers the most about employing you. They expect the treework to be done, but they never expect the mess. They can often get quite shocked when they see how much mess is made. Sometimes they even get quite angry about it. I’ve had a few jobs where the customer has started getting a bit aggressive over the mess. That’s fun. How far you play with the customers anger is down to how many cups of tea and biscuits they’ve served. If they’ve served close zero then you get to have a bit more fun. You never cross the professional line, but you certainly don’t do the same kind of damage control as you would for a customer for whom their tea and coffee game is on point.

So whilst a customer nearly always doesn’t expect the mess, what they’ll notice is how well you clean it up. For them the mess is “a thing that goes wrong” and cleaning it up is “a make good”. This is of course absurd, as the mess is a part of the job but if you don’t tell the customer to expect it (the easy / cowards way out) then this will be the bed you lie in. Fortunately for me, I explained to Neil that I’d be making a hell of a mess and as this was a freebie favour for a friend, I’d clean the worst of it up, but the final cleanup was his. He was fine with this as the entire garden was getting a revamp.

Cleanups are straight forward. First you get your tools away, then you move the heavy and then you blow the dust. Sometimes, you shovel the dust up and put it into dumpy bags and mix it in with the woodchip (don’t tell the tipsite that though). However on this occasion I simply blew it off the path. I was up against time on this as it was getting dark fast as you can see from the below photo.

Before and after blowing and also running out of daylight. I promise the aftershot has less sawdust in it.

And that was that. The cherry tree was gone. I got to meet Neil’s wife Kanni for the first time which was a nice treat and I got to have some exceptional conversations with Neil about the world and the concept of freedom. At this point you may be thinking there’s nothing more to write about, but there is.

Hand tools tend to pass from person to person. This is especially true for tools that have belonged to someone who has passed away. The people dealing with the estate often want these tools to go to people who will value them. I am one such person and I have many examples of this, and this removal led to the acquisition of another such item. This time a delightful axe with a wonderful beech handle. I named the axe Mr Skeldon as it belonged to Neil’s father who I remember fondly as a very capable man.

This axe is now called Mr Skeldon. It needs some work, but it is functional as it is.

I distinctly being amazed by Neil’s father when we were in our skateboarding phase. Mr Skeldon was an oldschool guy who knew a lot about making stuff. He was the only dad in our group to actually make a deck (the wooden top of a skateboard) for Neil. He made the plywood from veneers, he made the form, he glued the plywood on the form and he made a legit deck. There are not many of these people left in the world and Mr Skeldon was one of them. He passed first, before Mrs Skeldon and the saying that behind every great man is great woman holds credence for me (Hi Jo 💕). And so I’ll wrap up this post by apologising to Mr & Mrs Skeldon for removing their tree but I want them both to know two things. First, that I’m going to take very good care of my new axe – Mr Skeldon. Second, eating baked beans on toast in Neil’s front room whilst watching old skate videos, will forever be etched into my soul as some of the happiest times of my life.

I appreciate your attention.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Jamie.

1. I’ve promised my wife that I’ll die after her. I intend on keeping that promise.

2. “I can assure you, the money was just resting in my account” - Father Ted Crilly