A big tree and a small garden.
Tree surgery across Calderdale, from Sowerby Bridge. Nobody rings up asking for a crown reduction. They ring because the tree is too big, or it is dropping branches on the car.
So before anything else, here is what each job actually does to a tree — on one tree, next to one house, at the size it really is.
Most of what gets rung in about is one of two things.
It has outgrown the garden, or it is dropping bits. A tree like this one — nine and a half metres, five off the gable — is a normal Calderdale back garden, and it is also most of the phone calls.
A photo with a wheelie bin or a back door in it saves a lot of guessing about scale, which is the thing that is hardest to describe down a phone.
Usually the answer to what people wanted felling for.
Height and spread come off while the shape stays, so the tree is still a tree. Watch the canopy pull back off the roofline without the outline changing — that is the whole skill in it.
Plenty of trees people want felled do not need it. If the honest answer is to leave it alone, that is what you will be told.
When the garden is in shade, the tree does not have to go.
Thinning takes a proportion of the growth out of the canopy so light comes through it. Lifting takes the lower limbs off so you can walk and mow underneath.
The outline barely changes. Look at the shadow on the lawn rather than at the tree — that is where the difference shows, and it is what people are actually asking for.
The small job most worth doing early.
Dead limbs come out before they come down on a car, a greenhouse or somebody's head. They are the grey ones — easy to miss from the ground in summer, obvious from a rope.
It takes nothing off the live tree and changes nothing about how it looks from the house. It is simply the difference between a branch you chose to remove and one that chose its own moment.
Climbed and rigged down, not dropped.
There is no room to fell this one whole, so it comes down in pieces on a rope, from the top. Each section is cut, held, and lowered rather than let go.
It takes longer than dropping a tree in a field, and it is the difference between a tidy garden and a flattened border. On a tight plot it is usually the only sensible way.
