Trees Never Stop Growing!

If you saw my Abstract Thursday blip this week, you'll know that I spent some time pressure washing our front garden fence which, as it faces north, had quite a lot of moss on it. (It has 11 panels of the size of this one so you can imagine why it took a while.)

This panel is unique though - as you can see it had to fit around this enormous Ash tree which is gradually encroaching more and more onto the pavement ("sidewalk" if you're in N America). The tree has a "Tree Preservation Order" on it, which (along with the fact that we live in a "Conservation Area") means we can't do anything to it (even have it pruned) without permission from the Stasi jobsworths at the Local Council. The fence was erected for us about 6 years ago by our friendly local joiner (who has sadly retired since then) - and we had quite a discussion as to how to fit it round the tree. He did an excellent job of trimming the planks, but we knew that the tree would continue to expand (and it has done, so that it was starting to push on the planks): therefore I asked him to secure them with screws rather than nails to make it easier to remove and trim more off them. At the time of taking the photo this morning, I'd finished dealing with those on the right of the photo - if you look closely you'll see that I decided to use new screws to re-attach them as the old ones were rather rusty. I've now done those on the left as well but that was since the photo so the screws you see there are old and rusty - and there's not much gap between the planks and the tree on that side.

(I assume that in another 5-6 years a repeat performance will be necessary.)

The next phase is to paint the whole fence with coloured wood preservative - my Editor has actually started this job at one end - I'll blip the whole thing when it's finished.