Tuesday, September 24th, 2024
Just outside the house on the west side was a huge Thuja Pliccata tree. It was already there, in the form of an overgrown hedge, in 1960 when my family came to live here, thirty years after it was planted. But the Thuja eventually grew taller than the house and its enormous trunks and roots threatened to break the sewage and waste water pipework that run underneath it. It was a crazy idea to plant such a species right on top of the house’s main drainage system in the first place, but I don’t expect the residents in the 1930s ever imagined that their small hedge would still be alive almost a hundred years later.
The vast tree was taken down in sections earlier this summer and today we hired a stump grinder to flatten some of its stumps, along with many other stumps that are dotted around the grounds. The larger Thuja stumps will have to stay to let nature deal with them.