Tree Gang Pt. 51: Cherry tree orchards and pub car parks

HANDS on hips and visor tipped back, Malcolm declared with great profundity: “It is abundantly clear, Karl, that your average Joe and Jane Public do not understand a blessed thing about trees. To them they are merely static objects, like sculptures or garden gnomes and so it comes as a complete and utter surprise when that bit of a weed around the drainage grid suddenly becomes a towering leafy menace.”

“You reckon?” said Karl, clutching the ladders, ready for action.

“What do you think?” Malcolm gesticulated towards the multi-stemmed ash tree rising slap bang in front of the bay window of the house before them and continuing on up past the bedroom window. “I mean ... how do you not notice that thing creeping up?”

They were stood outside a terraced house located in one of Hanbridge’s seedier districts.

It was a familiar story. Seedling sprouts in a filled-in cellar and starts its journey to the sky. Long past the point where it could easily have been pulled up, some bright spark saws it off at the base and imagines the problem solved. They then ignore the still-growing stump, until years later it’s blocking the light and undermining the house. The three trunks of the common ash had managed to produce a respectable girth over what Malcolm estimated to be a decade and a half of uninterrupted growth. 

Admittedly this was a pretty extreme example of the genre and Malcolm wasn’t a bit surprised to learn the house was divided into bedsits. Problem trees of this nature were commonly found on rented houses run by absent landlords who didn’t give a monkey’s.

Though sometimes they were also to be found outside the decaying homes of pensioners who really ought to be in a home. Malcolm recalled one where a tree had actually grown up in front of the car parked on the drive.

Still, these one-off private contracts provided extra cash for the council and an interesting diversion from the usual maintenance work.

“What’s the plan?” asked Karl. There was just the two of them this week. The rest of the team were using up holiday allowances before the April reset so Malcolm had decided to tackle some of these smaller one-off jobs. That didn’t mean they weren’t awkward though – far from it.

“I’ll have to climb up and drop it piece by piece. Too many parked cars around to clearfell it, not to mention the front wall and the possibility of kickback into the bay window.”

Also, Malcolm liked any excuse to climb.

His love of climbing had begun long before he joined the council. As a child he and his friends would often try to scale street trees, shinning up them with legs wrapped around the trunks. And not just trees. Lampposts were fair game too, though they abandoned telegraph poles after spending a painful afternoon extracting splinters from their legs. A favourite place to play was amongst the garages behind a local pub. The tall Lombardy poplars on the perimeter didn’t interest them so much, but the cherry orchard behind the pub was the perfect playground. Malcolm and his friends would sneak between the garages and, keeping a wary eye out for staff from the pub, dash out and scramble up into the lower branches. Once off the ground, a reckless game of tig would take place.

READ MORE: Tree Gang Pt. 48: Malcolm becomes a union representative

The trees, being quite close together, had tangled their dark branches over the years, making it possible for a light young child, with no fear of heights, to scamper through the canopy like a human squirrel.

These days Malcolm got paid to indulge his arboreal desires, although health and safety was more of a concern than it had been to his reckless younger self.

Laying the ladder against the largest trunk, and with Karl steadying it, he climbed up to tie on to the middle trunk. Once secure, he shinned up into the branches, setting up ropes and pulleys, and began taking some down.

“Watch the rope, Karl,” he shouted as the first sections swung perilously close to the house window, catching Karl off guard so that he nearly dropped the rope. Alerted by the noise of sawing and shouts, a few of the residents came out to watch. It turned out Karl knew some of them and soon they were being offered cans of beer and strange cigarettes, which Malcolm and Karl politely refused. 

It soon transpired that the only reason they’d been commissioned to cut the tree down was because one of the residents had fallen from it after arriving home drunk one night.

Having forgotten his keys, he’d climbed up with the idea of using the tree to gain entrance via an open bedroom window. In the process he had slipped on the sill and crashed into the yard, knocking over a motorbike and demolishing an abandoned chest of drawers. Apparently he was trying to sue the landlord for leaving a tree where he could climb it.

The next job on the list was also a self-setter – a chunky goat willow growing next to the end wall of a semi-detached house. 

“I like the tree, but I’m a bit concerned about the foundations,” said the owner, an elderly gentleman and keen gardener.

In all fairness, Malcolm had some sympathy. He’d once had a goat willow growing at the end of the yard when he lived in his old house. It had been a pleasant bit of greenery in an otherwise dull setting, until it started pushing out the back wall.

Self-setters, Malcolm told Karl, were the ninjas of the tree world. They crept in unseen, tucked away in some forgotten corner, quietly getting bigger until it was too late.

Sometimes this was an advantage. Many a robust established council tree had started life as a rogue seedling in a shrubbery, outperforming its purposefully planted neighbours. Sturdy common ash and sycamore dominated the borders of Hanbridge Park, while out on the grass their sickly exotic counterparts stood forlorn and strangled by their own tree ties. 

Ken White, before he retired in ‘85, had told Malcolm an old tale about a self-setter. 

“See that tree?” he said one day, pointing out a huge black poplar growing outside one of the local pubs. “Nearly a hundred years old now and do you know how it got there?”

“Someone planted it?”

Ken laughed. “The pub’s called The Oak Tree. That should give you a clue. My grandfather said that when the pub was built in 1890 they planted an oak beside it. The oak died, as they often did in those days of smoke and pollution, but in the meantime a poplar seedling had taken root next to it. Well, a tree’s a tree so nobody bothered to remove it. Ninety-five years later it’s still there. Best of all, I often hear passing folk refer to it as an oak because of the name of the pub. I tell you the average bloke in the street doesn’t understand trees.”

Self-setters seemed to be the theme of the week as it progressed and Malcolm found himself spending a good deal of time removing sneaky interlopers. Springing from behind people’s sheds, sprouting vigorously from hedges or tucked away in tiny gaps between buildings. One was a young sycamore sandwiched awkwardly between a house and a garage.

Halfway down the long gap between the two it was nigh-on impossible to get at. The upper branches Malcolm dealt with by laying a ladder across the flat roof of the garage.

He carefully cut them off and chucked them down to Karl, ever mindful that one slip would send either him or a branch crashing through the asbestos roof.

This was a piece of cake compared to the removal of the main trunk, which had to be dealt with by delicate use of a pole saw. The gap was so narrow Malcolm couldn’t fit into it, let alone gain access with a normal chainsaw. It was nerve-wracking work, pushing the pole down the narrow space to cut into the tree while trying not to smash the chain into the brickwork of the house or the concrete wall of the garage. Constantly afraid the saw would get trapped under the weight of the collapsing tree, Malcolm took it down in small sections, dragging them out with the help of a yard brush. When finished, he fed stump killer into it from above and fervently hoped the damn thing wouldn’t come back.

Trees merged with railings were another (un)popular problem. A pathway running alongside one of the local schools was festooned with ash and willow that had been allowed to weave (with the help of local children) between the iron railings of the school.

Malcolm did what he could, but in the end was still left with several sections of railing bound with immovable wooden blocks.

“We could carve them into sculptures,” suggested Karl.

Malcolm considered this but decided it would be easier just to drill a few holes into the irretrievable logs and call them ‘bug houses’.

“Schools like that sort of thing,” he said.

Karl agreed. “We’ll tell them it’s helping nature.”

The last job of the week was a real trip down memory lane. The garages behind the pub where Malcolm had played as a child were coming down and the new owners had hired the council to remove several large self-setters, mostly ash and goat willow, that had sprouted up between the garages over the years.

Malcolm was pleased to return to his old playground but dismayed to find that his beloved cherry orchard was no more. A sad row of stumps served as the only reminder of the trees that should have been blossoming.  They’d been removed to make way for a block of hotel chalets, part of a new venture to attract travelling businessmen and women.

However, along the edge of the car park, a few yards from where the old orchard had been, pink blossom added colour to a bedraggled privet hedge. Malcolm smiled. The orchard may have gone, but its self-setter ninja children were sneakily taking over.