A Tale of Two Trees

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about all of the wood processing activities Chris and I undertake here at Bardmony – and in it, I noted that we had lost more trees than usual this year because of the various storms that we have had.

Two of the trees we lost had particularly taken my dad’s fancy when he was here for the wedding in 2022; they were quite close to the house, just before the dry stone dyke, and I caught him musing over them one pink evening a few nights before the wedding as he sat with his drink:

‘Britt, these trees are symbolic of a marriage – over the years, though they’re separate trees, they’ve grown together and outlasted every storm.’

He so liked these two trees that he even asked our wedding photographer to take an artsy shot of them. Awww! 🥰

Well, fast forward a year… 😬

With his thought ringing in our minds, we couldn’t help but feel a sense of foreboding when the first tree, entirely unexpectedly, came down after a day of fairly mild rain in July last year – which deepened when its neighbour came down in an October storm a few months later.

But, all in all, we count ourselves super lucky: as you’ll see from the photos, it was a very close call – and despite the literal brush (haha!) with near disaster, neither tree damaged the house, our dry stone dyke, and thanks to Chris’s quick thinking, or our oil tanks.

This is the tree that came down in July – you can see the second tree directly to the left still standing quite happily:

The second tree we actually caught in the act of falling down – it had been a ferociously stormy night with huge gusts of wind, so much so that we had lost power for a time, and we went out early the next morning to survey the damage.

In this first photo, you can see the first limbs have split and fallen, but most of the tree is still standing. We could hear it creaking rather eerily, though, and we both had the feeling that it was only a matter of time. We were immediately nervous about the oil tanks, and rushed to the garage to find something, anything, to try to help direct the fall of the back limbs away from them.

It’s hard to see here but the top limb that’s down is resting against an upstairs window and the bottom limb is settled against the side of the house directly over the boiler shed roof.

Here, you can see the final state of the tree after everything fell. Two limbs have fallen diagonally to first two that came down, and one has gone backwards. We had used a rope and a few ratchet straps to try to winch the back limb to the first tree’s stump and, amazingly, succeeded in pulling it so that it fell about two feet to the left of our oil tanks. 😳

This was the view from inside my treadmill room for about a week afterwards:

We did all the clean up from the first tree ourselves – systematically stripping branches, logging into lengths, and carting to a pile up the bank for later processing. Let me tell you, it was a LOT of work; it took us nearly a week of evenings just to get it tidied up and piled elsewhere!

The second tree required working at height and part of it was resting against a Georgian window after it fell, so we asked our trusty tree surgeon Grant to help us with it. Grant later told us he was almost certain that a branch would ping the glass while he was sawing – but, miraculously, we didn’t lose even a single pane of glass.

All in all, a very close call – and a lesson well-learned: we certainly won’t be replacing those trees any time soon 😹