Deforestation on a tiny scale

Watching trees being felled makes me very uncomfortable. Not so my oldest son, for whom the sight of chaps in high vis vests skimming 20 feet into the air to whizz about with chainsaws is second only to the circus, but I really dislike it. We recently felled a number of trees from our new garden.

None were of any consequence, most were dead or diseased or stunted because of poor planting (we had a whole semi-circle of 12 silver birches that a previous owner apparently planted as part of a vendetta against our immediate neighbours!). We’ve actually planted more trees than we’ve felled since arriving, but even so, seeing something that’s taken years to attain it’s height come crashing down made me feel quite queasy. On the positive side though, nowhere in the garden is out of bounds for the children (some of the trees were unstable) and what formal garden we do have is now sunny and bright. We also used some of the bits of wood to create a little balancing circle of logs for our son to play on – he loved being able to help us set the logs out!

Another huge bonus is that the felling yielded about £2000 worth of firewood (according to the nice local saw mill chaps that came to chop it up for us) as well as all the logs we need to make bark paths in our woodland garden. So there you have it, sustainably sourced wood for a variety of uses that will also save us a considerable sum on materials. I still wish we hadn’t had to chop them down though.

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