Out on a limb

One of our fellow pétanque players makes his living as a semi-itinerant arborist. He’s in town at the moment so we hired him for a day’s work clearing jungle. Money well spent.

In several of our homes I’ve felt a need to start things off by taming the green growing things. In Missouri it was the trees growing on the dam to our little lake. In hindsight that was probably a mistake… it looked worse without them and probably didn’t perform any better. Here in our Birkenhead house we had exuberant English ivy taking over a fence. The initial hacking back was a few weekends of work, but then it was much more under control in subsequent years.

Now, we have a steep slope down to the water. At some point, previous owners put in paths and plants and even an irrigation system. But it’s all completely overgrown and more or less impassable. Gordon the arborist made a big dent in opening things back up, but it remains to be seen how much we’ll actually get down there.