Chainsaw or move a grown 30' tree? (General Garden)

Member Name: SachaG

Product:	General Garden
Date:	04/03/02 (186 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Keeping the tree alive

Disadvantages: Cost

When we moved house in July 2001, one of the many reasons for choosing the house was its large gardens that back on to open fields without another house in view. At the side of house was a 30-foot Holly tree, the tree was full of berries and has a perfect shape to it, and we quickly became rather attached to it.

It was always our plan to extent the house during 2003 and when we sat down with a builder we decided to build much bigger than planned. This had one problem; the Holly tree was now in the way. The builder offered to cut down the tree and remove its roots for a small extra charge, but neither if us wanted to lose the tree.

So we set about finding a tree surgeon that would be able to transplant the whole tree to another location in the garden. After a few days of phone calls we were referred to a company called Nature First in Gloucester, who sent of lady to the house to look at the tree and site. This company uses a machine called a tree spade, which is part of mid-sized lorry. She explained that the tree spade would clamp around the tree trunk then 4 large (around 6 feet high and very wide) hydraulically driven spades would be forced in the ground around the tree. The spades took a root ball of 2 meters across by 5 feet deep, all roots outside of the ball are cut as the spades are driven into the ground, the tree is then simply lifted out of the ground and moved to its new home where a ‘plug’ of earth has already been removed by the machine.

The ground needs to be as hard as possible as when the tree is removed the lorry weights in at around 18-22 tonnes. So we waited until the ground had frozen over the Christmas period. The tree spade seemed to make light work of the whole job and had most of the neighbours and a handful of people who were either driving or walking by stopping off to watch the action. The process took around 3 hours to complete in total. Our holly tree is now in its new location further d
own the garden, it has three thick metal guide-ropes pegging it into the ground and they have to stay on for around 2 years, the tree will also need a huge amount of water through the summer (luck we’re not on a water metre).

Two months on the tree seems to be doing well and we just about to start building. Nature First were not able to guarantee the tree would survive the transplant, and said its should have about a 95% chance. Seeing the tree in its new home now makes me think that it was worth saving it and gives a nice story to tell others our may also be in the same situation.

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