As it turns out, unofficial, unauthorized tree lopping is frowned upon. I’m not even an actual tree felling professional, so the fact that I did a pretty good job at felling that awful gumtree down the bottom of the garden is pretty impressive. If I do say so myself, that is.
It might have fallen on the fence a LITTLE bit, but that’s just an occupational hazard when taking good care of a garden. It just had to be Mrs Finlay’s garden as well, and that lady is obsessed with everything being in order. She was the one who summoned a legion of Melbourne professional arborists last year to remove every tree from every nature strip in the street. I mean, there weren’t even that many of them, but they were all gone within the space of the day. Mrs Finlay checked it out with the council, went through the proper channels and managed to convince them that the trees were a parking hazard. Thus…the storm of arborists. Don’t know why she needed them, because when Mrs Finlay sets her mind on something, she’s a hurricane anyway.
Thing is, the street looked better for it, and now people can park without smacking their doors on the trees, so this arborist thing really does work.
Mrs Finlay should be HAPPY that I’m bringing down old and ugly trees. She’s been moaning about that gumtree for ages, saying that it interferes with her personal sun-spot and telling me that it’s coming down in a storm soon, and it’ll probably kill her, and then I’ll be sorry.
Why would she be out in a storm? We’ll never know. But the tree is gone now, along with all our worries, except maybe the fact that a piece of our fence and Mrs Finlay’s deck chair were crushed. Okay, so, maybe I should have consulted her list of arborists for hire in Melbourne and got in a professional. But you live, you learn, you lop, and you pay for a new fence.
-Alan