Whoops! There goes another tree.

It's been a winter for trees falling over - so many storms, so much water. Trees can only take so much, and then they snap - literally!

Last week I arrived at work to find that one of the old Plum trees in the meadow had snapped right off, about 10' up:

So where was the top of it? Answer, lying on the ground:

"Oh dear," said my Client, "what shall we do with it?"  Knowing that she loves sculpture and used to have several dead tree trunks lying around the meadow, I made the obvious suggestion that we should chop off the small branches, and keep the main thing as a living/decaying piece.

Half an hour, with my trusty bow saw, later:

It's the Tarantula of Doom!

The amount of smaller brushwood that came off was astonishing, I made three heaps of it, each easily as big as the current bonfire heap - here's one of them (right).

We agreed it would be better to get the bonfire heap burned off first, then move these piles across, otherwise it would make a huge wobbly heap, which might be a little intimidating for the Client's husband, who loves to do the bonfires, but who is always concerned that if it's too big, it might get out of control.

I expect that I'll be asked to reduce the Tarantula in size once we've had a chance to assess it: at present it's a little too big and sprawling, so I anticipate a fair amount of "fettling",  to get it into shape.

Although I do think the Tarantula is quite amusing!