Timber!

Our old friend Sharon who used to live a couple of doors away had a beautiful Eucalyptus tree growing in her garden.  I say used to because our neighbour John (the one with a tip for a garden) asked if he could cut off a large bough which was growing into and over part of his garden.  When he cut it off it happened to be a  particularly cold spell in winter 2010 and unfortunately this killed the tree.  So for ages we have had this stark reminder of its former beauty seen in the pic below.  

It was then with great surprise that we rushed up to the base of the tree after John mentioned that it was growing again.  Sure enough there was a branch with the grey blue leaves on looking very healthy.
This sparked a series of text messages to Sharon who is living and working in Canada.  This also re-ignited the debate about felling the dead tree before it blew over in the wind with the possibility of damaging various fences and walls.
It was decided that it should come down that day (Sunday) and after collecting a little more wood from our logging site we set to the task
My idea was to cut off all the branches then fell the trunk.  This I did for a couple of the lower branches but the 3 main vertical ones were in too dangerous a position to use the chain saw.

So here I am having a very short attempt at sawing them off with a bow saw.  The wood was so dry and hard I decided to just fell the whole thing.

 So having sawn out the wedge in the direction I wanted it to go I tied a rope as high up the branches as possible and my lovely assistant Sally stood up in the garden pulling on the rope to hopefully help it along.

Thankfully all went well as can be seen in this pic and my assistant can be seen waving from just out of range of the falling branches.

So there we are we chopped off all the branches and finally yesterday made cheeses out of the trunk which I shall smash with the maul today to finish the job.  You can just see the "new" tree growing from way down the bottom of the original stump which is hidden by the branch.  I sawed flat and covered the old stump with some lead flashing in the hope of preserving it so the new tree has time to establish itself.
More excitement though as John declared that "his gardener" would be working again today to sort out his tip/garden -  -  I cant wait!