A Tree-mendous Adventure - Day 3

On site at 06:45.  Germany is one hour ahead of UK time so I cannot help but think it is 05:45 back home and no one is up.  At Von Ehrens, people are starting to recognise my face so it is not as daunting, but the language barrier does present a problem.

I must say, thank you for football.  Personally, I am not the biggest football fan in the world; overpaid players who kick a ball for a living – and I am on site at 06:45, that is not a real job!  However, that is another story.

The beautiful thing about football is that no matter where you are in the world, it is a way of communicating with about 90% of men from all walks of life.  Now, I am from Stockport, Greater Manchester, but for arguments sake it is easier to say to people that I am from Manchester , in which people instantly think of Manchester United.  So, I basically pretended I was a Manchester United fan just to get along.  To say to people that I was actually a Stockport County fan would only complicate matters, although I presume people would understand what I would mean saying ‘Stockport County’ when it is followed by ‘nicht so gut’.

On a different note, the task for the morning was getting 500 semi-mature trees ready for delivery.  The trees were already bagged and netted.  All that was required was taking the labels off the trees and making sure that the trees had stem protection.

After this, the machines would do the work, lifting the trees onto the lorry ready for delivery.

Once the order was completed, we then proceeded to spend an hour cleaning and tidying the yard where we had been working.  This is such an important thing to do as it puts things away in their correct place, eliminates hazards and is a safe environment to work in.  If the working environment is pleasant to be in, then the productivity of the work can only be improved.

For the afternoon, I was moved onto tree pruning.  At Von Ehrens, it is a high-scale operation involving a machine which a person stands in with secateurs, and the machine moves up and down so that you can get to all parts of the tree to shape it accordingly.

The afternoon was spent pruning Quercus roba, which was in a semi-mature state and has been in the ground for some time, experiencing a hard prune each year.  There are two approaches towards attitudes of pruning;

As a person who is fascinated by the beauty of trees, there is a part of me that cannot help but think that this is a slightly cruel practise to keep pruning these trees so hard in order to achieve a desired shape.  To me, it is the human equivalent of a model starving themselves in order to be thin and achieve a certain body shape.  It is not natural and it is essentially manipulating nature as you prevent the tree from taking on a natural shape.

On the other hand, people have been coppicing and pollarding trees for centuries.  This does give a certain character to the trees and some of our oldest trees are pollarded/ coppiced trees.  Additionally, pruning does increase the longevity of the tree.  Furthermore, trees do need to be pruned to be managed and maintained for health and safety and protecting the public in parks and streets.  So there are different attitudes towards pruning and there is a fine line between essential pruning and pruning for human appeasement.

The day, it was very interesting and varied and again opened my eyes to the scale of the nursery is huge and is seriously big business.

Pictures soon to follow.