My first encounter with a tree surgeon was at a rental property in Sydney’s Hunters Hill when I was 21.
As with basically all the homes I've ever rented, this was a knockdown just waiting for the foolish tenants stupid enough to ever pay for it to leave. Eventually we did, and in came the tree surgeon to assess which of the specimens in the yard could or should be kept when the owners demolished the home. Nothing in the backyard was to be saved but the big gum out the front got to live.
I was very fond of the backyard trees and said so. My little brother, his girlfriend at the time (my flatmate) and I would sit out on the back verandah, smoke, drink and watch the almost-trained possums trapeze through the trees and arrive at the bannister, expecting fruit. (Not me.)
The tree surgeon told me that she didn't get into the business because she likes cutting down trees. She got into the business because she loves trees and wants to preserve them. And in order to do that, it meant letting people remove 'garbage trees' (her words) so that the finer specimens could continue. It's the regulatory trade off.
It's an exchange I haven't thought about in over a decade, but it clearly had an impact on me because it all came washing back this morning when my own handsome, tree death angels showed up at the farm.
As part of the transition from overgrazed, compacted, weed-riddled sheep farm to polyculture booze orchard and pastured poultry business, a lot of the really poor decisions from the previous owner need to be reversed. (He'd planted a willow, which is a restricted species anyway, in the wettest part of the property. If you recall the podcast, this is the tree I nicknamed Trump for his complete inability to drain the swamp. In the above image, he's being impeached into the woodchipper.)
There were also several long-dead wattle trees that someone had unsuccessfully attempted to burn down. They went.
And while strolling around to the neighbours, I find out that many of the silly trees the previous owner had planted right along the fence line were an exercise in passive aggression. So removing them might balance out my permaculture karma somewhat as it counts as 'return to community'. (Don't @ me.) At the very least, my neighbour's apple trees will now get full sun.
The tree felling that made me most feel like Saruman today was the pinus radiata on the back boundary. You can see it in the main image for this post. The reality is this is as close as one can get to my first tree surgeon's definition of garbage tree, at least in Tasmania. Not because it's 'introduced'. Declaring something indigenous based on the tiny window of time in which an organism is first described by Europeans is the stupidest thing about so-called ecological thinking and that's really saying something. It hasn't been best practice for biologists or anthropologists for decades.
This is a logging industry tree, and the reality is the one at the back of the farm is only half grown and already covering a goodly chunk of my neighbours field. They would be well within their rights to ask me to remove it at any stage, and it is faster and cheaper to do so when it is half grown, and before my hundred or so apple trees that will be planted up there -which it would crush- actually get put in the ground.
So down it came.
Knowing all this, and knowing that there will be literally thousands of new perennial organisms growing on my tiny five acres over the next few years, and knowing that I have a locally famous soil biologist on the case to help me improve the ruinous condition of the fields, it was still pretty intense.
Speaking of permaculture, something Bill Mollison said -which he may have got off his father, actually- was "never sell anything off your farm unless it can walk, fly or swim off". This apparently homespun wisdom is biologically sound advice. You maintain and even grow biodiversity without additional inputs by selling the higher order products of the plant kingdom, rather than removing the actual plants.
So, obviously, the woodchips have been piled up as close as the truck could get them to the soon-to-be kitchen garden and the soon-to-be on-contour tree lanes. We're heading into winter here so they'll be able to break down over the next seven months, at which point the microbial assembly may well be ready to participate in and improve the land which gave their host organism life/them life.
Thus, the trees haven't actually left the property. The parts that can't be woodchipped have been chopped for firewood and the rest is transmuting into a state that makes ever more trees possible. Sort of begs the question of what even is a tree in the first place.
Which, of course, begs the question of what even are you?
It was obviously a wildly expensive exercise, but -particularly after the stump grinder shows up on Thursday and clears all the stumps everyone else before me has just left- it feels... empowering. With all the clearing and brushcutting and emergency irrigation, it will look less like the farm I bought and more like stage zero of my farm.
Despite the positive sentiment, there was still some little pangs. A big ol' tree is gone. It's existence will continue and grow beyond anything the constraints of being a tree could scarcely conceive of. But still.
I pondered this as I got up this morning. I watched the mist curl around it, and the pre-dawn light silhouette its last ever morning as a tree. A day that coincided -by virtue of a few thousand of you looking at its image now- with the very height of its worldwide fame. An odd destiny for a garbage tree in remote southern Tasmania, when you think about it.
You begin to understand the primacy of the tree in the world's spiritual systems. Even in woodchip form, the archetype still has lessons to impart.