Monday, July 26th, 2021
This garden was planted up a century ago. Inevitably, some of its trees are reaching the end of their lives. Ten days ago I casually mentioned to my tree surgeon that the big cherry tree near the yew hedge was beginning to look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It has been like that for years, and we have sometimes removed boughs to reduce the weight on one side, but this summer the angle widened to a worrying degree. The roots were rising from the ground and the yew hedge was now at risk, so I asked the tree surgeon to come over and look at it last Wednesday.
We decided that the tree must be felled sooner rather than later. This was sad, as that tree had been part of my life since my early childhood in 1960 when we came to live here. We had four more days of hot weather scheduled, so he said he would take the tree down once the heat had abated. That was five days ago.
Yesterday the weather turned. At the end of a day of rain and thunderstorms, I glanced out of an upstairs window and saw that the tree had taken matters into its own hands. That venerable old cherry, having just yielded its last crop of fruit to the local wood pigeons, jays and blackbirds, decided to gracefully bow out from this world rather than be subjected to the guillotine.
