Necessary but Not Nice

We live in Adelaide, South Australia which is an area of Australia blessed (and I use that term scathingly) with wondrous 'bay of biscay soil'.  Our house is in an area which is particularly fond of movement, if the nearby main road is anything to go by given that it undulates dramatically despite being patched up regularly. Of course the Dept of Transport's solution is to put up a sign that says 'Warning, uneven surface' like that really helps, thanks for your efforts!

Anyway some years ago we, in our 'wisdom', planted a couple of what we thought at the time were small bottle brush trees which grew to be somewhat taller than the suggested maximum of 3 metres tall.  I loved these trees as they shaded the front of our house in the summer, had masses of lovely flowers in the spring, followed by pretty pink new foliage and were a haven for birds which we watched through our loungeroom windows.

However over the last 18 months we have experience some serious cracking in our house.  Now we are no strangers to cracks in our house. Its double brick so has brick internal walls as well as externally.  The major irritation in all the years we've had the house has been fixing cracks on a semi-regular basis.  These latest cracks however are concerning me as they are in new locations and in walls previously unaffected.  After some serious late night worrying and deliberating we made the decision to have our trees removed and that sad day arrived this week.

Here they are before they were cut down:

You can just see my 6' 2" son standing on the verandah behind them - that will give you an idea of their height.  They weren't enormous just too big for such a small yard and way to close to the house. ( Don't mind the weeds in the street verge, any lawn that was there died off during water restrictions in our drought a few years back and we haven't replaced it).

Why did we cut them down? This might give you an idea:

 

The front of the house looks so bare and forlorn at the moment.  We do have a lovely pile of woodchips for mulch now at least.  We spent Sunday redistributing the woodchips around the front and back gardens. I love to see men at work don't you?! (No 1 son on the left and Dad on the right).  This is about half of the pile we started with!

Of course this kind of work needs supervising and our old dog Molly was keeping a watchful eye on things and helping out by chewing up as many sticks as she could get her teeth into!

Here's No. 2 son hard at work! He was actually waiting for the wheel barrow to be loaded up but he got much busier after the neighbour over the road lent us two more wheelbarrows!

The tree people are coming back to mulch the stumps this week and then we'll have to come up with a new garden plan. As we have gone from mostly full shade to full sunshine, in Adelaide in the coming summer that means scorching hot so we have a major re-think to do while staying away from anything taller than 1.5 metres - I'm not getting caught again!

Thanks for visiting my blog today,