Cowboys!

Or should I say clowns?!

Apologies for the following personal rant! This was not my intended blip for the day, but the day’s proceedings overtook everything else....

These two were called in by our neighbours to ‘trim’ the 30ft conifers at the bottom of their garden. No protective clothing, no safety gear, just one ladder, one rope and a chainsaw between them! No wonder then that when it came to removing the highest part of the tree overhanging our garden, they managed to drop the entire thing onto our greenhouse! By some miracle, nothing was broken!!

After this incident, they did start to take a bit more care, as you can see from this photo!?! The one at the top is now balancing on the tree stump that he has just created, and is removing the rest of the upper branches by swinging the chain saw below him with one hand!!! I took this photo so I could show it to the Paramedics to explain how he had managed to kill himself! Fortunately it wasn’t needed.

And the end result of this massacre? A row of eight hideous tree stumps, less than half the original height of the trees, with around six feet of bare trunk at the top, and a couple of branches left at the bottom of each tree (you can just see the top of one to the left of the shot). Not only have we lost the privacy that these trees gave to our house and garden, we will now have to look at this horrendous sight every day, instead of a row of beautiful trees that were always alive with birds. It must look even worse from our neighbour’s house, but they are moving out tomorrow and are renting out their house so they’re not affected!!

The lesson from this story? If you want something doing properly, call in a professional!