Dear Readers, once every five years or so (or seven years in this case, ahem) I get the tree surgeon in to trim the whitebeam. The photo above doesn’t really do it justice – this magnificent tree is now nearly thirty feet tall, and is so dense in summer that it shades the whole garden. Just in front is a hawthorn which is about two-thirds as tall. But both are getting a little out of scale for what is essentially quite a small garden, and with the increasing number of storms that we have (particularly during times when both trees are fully-leafed) it feels important to look after them for the long-term.

The whitebeam and hawthorn in full leaf in 2022

I’m lucky enough to know a little bit about the history of the whitebeam, due to the magic of the internet – I was contacted by the lovely lady who used to live in my house, and who planted the original tree in 1976! That was a drought year, and the sapling was kept alive with bath water and washing-up water. Well, it’s certainly come on a bit since then.

Whitebeam berries

The trees will be trimmed as soon as possible (before the birds think about nesting), and for a while they’ll look very sorry for themselves. Part of me hates doing this, but I know that sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind – if trees aren’t maintained then they can lose whole branches, or even topple over (my worst fear). Plus, when you live in a densely-packed neighbourhood you need to take account of the effect on the light in other people’s gardens. But I have a lot of faith in the tree surgeon – he’s trimmed the trees back twice in the past fifteen years, and I love how he always takes a drawing of the tree before starting work, and thinks carefully about preserving its shape and health.  I’ll make sure that the trees are well-watered and mulched post trimming, and I fully expect that they’ll come into even more vigorous leaf than they did last time we did any work. And then hopefully that will be that for another six or seven years.

Blue tit on the emerging whitebeam leaves

Is anyone else about to launch into something that they’ve been putting off? How do you feel? I feel a strange mixture of relief and trepidation (not least because sorting out parking for a van and a chipper outside the house is always a fraught occupation in these narrow County Roads streets) . Roll on the day when it’s all over and the trees can start to recover.

Starling in the hawthorn