Chops away…

Getting rid of a friend’s tree can be emotionally draining and physically arduous, as Toby is about to discover

- Toby Buckland

TODAY started with high hopes and a simple mission: to remove a friend’s unwanted tree stump. I know… it doesn’t sound all that simple, but it’s a London plane (Platanus x Hispanic), so I’m hoping the roots will come quietly.

While plane trees don’t support much wildlife (just one associated insect species compared to 284 for an oak tree), they are loved by town planners for their compact roots and have contributed a great deal to our arboricultural understanding.

Up until the late 1980s, textbook diagrams of trees depicted roots that echoed the size and the shape of the branches above, most going straight down into the subsoil. But after the Great Hurricane of 1987, that all changed.