...And the Tree Came Down

More work for the royal couple today as we continue to chop up and break down the tree. The discouraging part of the whole thing is that once we finish this, the rest of the tree has to come down and that means we have to do it all over again.

This is fascinating to me since I was just learning about how to prune a tree from The Smiling Gardener's online course.

Trees have a way of shedding branches while causing minimal damage to the rest of their structure, and that is a system of branch collars. A branch collar is something like our shoulder or hip socket where the limb joins into the tree. When you prune, you're supposed to leave the branch collar in place so the tree can heal around the wound without causing disease and rot, and I have seen the collars from the outside of the tree, but never how the branch fits into the collar on the inside.

As I was breaking the branches apart, this one didn't snap like the others, it was more like it popped out or slid out. And it was really cool, because there it was, the part of the branch that goes into the root collar!

This is a good angle to see the root collar, how it bulges out a little around the branch.

It's strange to look out the window and no longer see the other half of the tree hanging off. But you can see how damaged the rest of the tree is... there's unfortunately no way to save it, it's going to rot and eventually it will fall where it pleases... which most likely won't be pleasing to us. So once we chop up the downed half we will drop this tree as well.

Lots of wood for the mounds!

More butterflies

The tree on the ground... it's probably a good 40 feet, and some of it was already chopped up so that we could get to the fence to have it repaired.

Another root collar where a branch was shed.

We have elderberries growing in the back. I want to gather them up but we have to move some weeds out of the way first.

And the weeds are abuzz with honeybees and bumblebees and butterflies. So I want to clear out as little as possible because we like honeybees and butterflies. I'm dubious about the bumblebees... people say they aren't aggressive but the first thing that ever stung me was a bumblebee.

This is one of our red-tailed hawks. He is uncooperative when it comes to being photographed. I rue the one time I saw him perched on a power line and I didn't have my camera...

Someday I will get his picture close up. But for now this will have to do.

And now, back to the grind...