On looking after trees and trees looking after us

This was the April view from our bedroom window in our city house:

Some years we could see a Collared Dove nest:

Some years that of a thrush:

This is what the road looked like:

I remember a young daughter collecting blossom petals and covering the path to the front door in a magical pink blanket. For the rest of the year the avenue of trees provided an access corridor for birds, linking green spaces at either end – swarms of Longtailed Tits would come twittering through.

It has now been decreed that all these flowering cherry trees are to be removed. So are the ones on the neighbouring road. So are the Limes in the adjacent Crescent.  Why? I presume it is in case a passing citizen trips slightly on an uneven pavement.

Our visitors today (see below) conversed about the value of a tree.  They had researched that a mature tree in a city had a value of millions of pounds – increased property values, wildlife habitats…

Interestingly tree cutting has been happening here today.  Is this the same or is it different?  We have a shelter belt of conifers that protect the house from the prevailing winds:

But it has become too tall, too straggly, and too thin:

(The hens are very fed up in this picture.  The tree work was meant to start the previous day and they had been confined to barracks, then had to stay there for two days)

So two nice young men came to sort it:

To leave it like this:

Now not too tall, still too straggly – to be rectified by side growth promoted by this crowning, still too thin – to be rectified by infilling with the willow we were gifted last week.

There were also a couple of Western Red Cedar in the Southern hedgerow, which – as expressed by the farmer – muddled it:

One came down completely and one was left as a trunk for ivy and honeysuckle:

This had a Bluetit nest in a box on its trunk.  The Tit shouted angrily while its tree was cut down, then was happy to go back to its box, albeit in a very different looking tree:

A dead Eucalyptus trunk came down:

providing fragrant fuel to add to this contribution to our wood store for next winter:

Meanwhile beans are lifting their heads:

and today the first cuckoo call echoing across from the opposite hill

the first newts spied scurrying around in the pond

and the (not quite first) firecrests seen and heard tszeeing around the plot.