Down comes the Western Red Cedar

Back in December I wrote about the preparations for having a large conifer removed at one of my gardens - by which I mean one of my clients' gardens, of course - and finally, last week, the planning permission was received and the Tree Surgeon arrived to do his work.

Here's the tree, to remind you:

...a whopping Western Red Cedar, with a split trunk.  

One whole day of roaring chainsaws and loud thumps later, there it was, gone.

Here's the state of play at the end of the day, when all but the largest pieces had been removed:

Impressive, huh? You can clearly see the split in the trunk. The lads ran out of time on the day - it was a very, very big tree - and left this lot behind, to be collected a day later.

The dustbin, in case you are wondering, was part of our Protect-the-Hydrangea plan: a plan which somewhat failed, as the tree men just dug it up and moved it safely out of the way.  Good thing too, it would have been completely flattened!

So, the moral of this story is that tree removal does tend to flatten the garden all around - not to mention the daffodil casualties all across the lawn. But it had to be done, and it's going to make a big difference to the whole garden, not just this area underneath it: my client commented that she looked at the shade it was casting,  in a rare sunny moment earlier in the week, and the shadow of this tree spread the whole way across the garden.

Once these bits are gone, we can clear the ground, dig it over, see if anything survived, then we can think about replanting.

Exciting!