Clean Slate

When we bought Gladys almost five years ago (this coming March), we knew that someday we would have to remove the trees in the front yard.  Today was that "someday."

The gnarled bottle brush tree stands in the middle of the front
yard with the palm tree behind it by the kitchen windows.

The bottle brush tree in the front yard had already lost four major limbs by the time we bought the house.  It was smaller because of that, and it had many less red brushes than a healthy tree would have.  Each year we have watched as more and more of the branches began to die.  Finally, we knew that it was time to put the tree out of its misery.

Workers begin to remove the few remaining
branches of the bottle brush tree.

The other tree in the front we both hated to see taken down, but it, too, was not a healthy tree.  The second one was the queen palm in front of the kitchen windows.  Whoever planted that tree years ago did not know much about landscaping because the tree was planted way too close to the house.  Over the years, it had started to lean over the kitchen roof, and a large crack about three-quarters of the way up the trunk caused further worry that one day a good wind would blow the tree right onto the roof.  We were advised by the city arborist to take the tree down when we removed the bottle brush.

So today was removal day.  At approximately 11:30, two huge trucks pulled in front of our house.  Four men with saws and equipment got out, and in less than an hour, both trees were gone.

The bottle brush tree was short enough that the men did not even have to use ladders.  A couple of saws at the end of poles made short work of the tree.

With one swift cut, the queen palm
tree falls to the ground.

The palm tree took even less time to take down.  One man lifted a large rope toward the top of the tree.  As a couple of men pulled on the rope, he sawed the tree across near the base. Down it went.  An end-loader carried the palm tree and trunk out to the curb where we were told that another truck would pick it up later.  Since the trunk of a palm is very fibrous, the men could not feed it into a chopper to turn it into the sawdust.

A large lift truck came later to load and to carry away
the remains of the palm tree.

After the workmen all left, Rick and I got to work on what was left of the front yard.  We know that we will have to move lots of dirt around to frame a new flower garden in front of the kitchen windows and to lay out where our new paver porch and sidewalk will go.

We started with a transit and strings to get some preliminary elevations and then fine-tuned those measurements into actual 2 x 4 frames down to which we must lower the ground.  We worked for almost two hours just getting things set up.  The palm tree roots are a royal pain to dig up since they are interwoven strings of fiber, so we will have our work cut out for us tomorrow as we continue to try to level the land.

Strings outline where the new sidewalk will go
as boards enclose the area of ground that we
have to remove.  The dirt path is all that remains of
the twisted sidewalk layout from 1960.

The new design for the yard will include two palm trees in the front with a garden between them where the old bottle brush tree once grew.  A smaller garden will be framed by the new pavers for the porch and sidewalk.  That vision will come true after much time, labor, and money. For now, we have a clean state on which to build our new front yard.