Trees and More Trees

In November we were very much focussed on trees and spent some time sorting them out.

The first one was this oak. It is half way up the slope from the Jubilee Way path to the viewpoint and was damaged to the extent that a large branch had become almost detached.

You can see in these photos that the branch has split away from the main trunk, probably from natural causes and not vandalism as we first thought. Although close to a path, it did not pose an immediate danger as a lot of it was already in contact with the ground. However, we needed to deal with it.

We began by removing the thinner branches and were careful not to put any of our volunteers at risk whilst doing so.

We piled up the arisings - thin branches and leafy bits ...

... and left the bigger stuff for the S Glos tree dept. experts to deal with over the next few days.

This they did admirably and restored the tree to a safe condition. As a bonus they also left the larger pieces of wood they'd removed. We can put these to good use in the future for other repair and restoration work.

Having dealt with the oak as best we could we moved on the the next tree.

This one was a much smaller affair that had toppled over the path between posts 16 and 17 in the old tree nursery area and was causing an obstruction to any body walking along.

Peter, Jim, Eric, Chris, Andy and me set about stripping off the smaller branches  ...

... then cut the trunk into lengths that will find a new home as part of our ongoing step repairs.

The third and final tree for the day was a thin branch that had fallen in the nursery area. It was lying across the path so we 're-purposed' it as a section of path edging.

A bit more tidying up of the path and we were finished for the day.