The other evening there was a knock at the door. Outside was a man who informed me that the tree in the front garden needed to be pruned back and that he was the person to do it for me.
Now the tree in question is a Betula ermanii which is known for its main characteristic which
is particularly stunning bark – creamy white, tinged with the faintest blush of pink. It also has a conical crown, catkins in the spring, mid green leaves throughout the season and a gentle yellow glow about it in the autumn. I love that tree. It is the first thing I see every morning and the birds sit in it and welcome the day. I love it to such an extent that we paid for a telephone engineer to come and reroute the telephone wires that ran through its crown, rather than cut it back in any way, which would have been significantly easier and cheaper to do. So there is no way that anyone was going to chop the crown of that tree off, however enterprising they may have been.
The man on my door step looked at me as though he could not believe his ears when I told him this. He went away but it was this man’s incredulity at my refusal to chop the tree back that made me realise what really divides the true gardener from the rest of the population.
It is this: – if a plant you love, such as the case of my Betula ermanii, becomes entangled in some
aspect of modern living, do you sacrifice the plant or try and find a way to save it? Obviously there are situations when the plant has to go but there are plenty of others were the plant is sacrificed just because it is the easiest, quickest or cheapest thing to do, particularly with trees. I think it is so sad to see trees that have had their heads chopped off, so to speak, especially when done badly or incorrectly. It looks brutal, impatient and aggressive.
That said, I have a dilemma on my hands at the moment. A garden which is being designed by my company, has a semi-mature willow tree in it, which is 2m away from the house of their next door neighbour. I think it should be removed to prevent any damage being inflicted on the house in the future but the garden owner wants to keep it as it is a graceful tree which her children love playing around.
So what to do? It breaks my heart to get it removed yet it was planted so badly in the first place that it will eventually cause damage to the neighbour’s house. So in this instance, it might be better to pollard it (correct term for chopping its branches off) so that it lives to see another day.
So, the conclusion I’ve eventually arrived at is that the true gardener is the one who plans
ahead.