Fear the Tree... or maybe the tree should fear us?

Living as we do, close to Stanford University, we're very familiar with their emblem of the tree. But there's also The Tree, with a capital T, which appears to be a living, breathing mascot. Apparently, every year students compete to be the Tree, making their own costumes and putting on their own outlandish stunts, and there's a whole family of merchandise based on the slogan of 'Fear the Tree'. I think this is partly meant to strike fear into the hearts of Stanford's sports rivals (somewhat fake seeing as they don't appear to be all that good at sport), and is partly a tip of the hat to the somewhat uproarious reputation of The Tree.

That, puzzled reader, is a long-winded and somewhat tenuous introduction to this week's blog, which is actually about the large tree close to the back door of our house. It's one of the large evergreen trees for which this area is famous, and it's hard to put in perspective just how big this tree is; or was.

Now as you can see from this picture, the tree is right in the middle of our driveway; or perhaps, to put it more fairly, our driveway was built around this tree. Unfortunately, the tree has started to lift the concrete slabs in the driveway, to the tune of 12-18 inches, so we knew that when we started renting the house, the tree would be disappearing at some point.

The question then is: how do you remove a 200 foot tree which has four separate houses within a 20 foot radius of its base? Let me answer that pictorially, with the clue that it involves a lot of cranes:

Work on the tree started on Monday, with folks in the crane cutting off branches and passing them down to be chipped immediately. That work continued through Tuesday.

The tree, after a major haircut

The cranes were parked in next door's back yardc, with some activity on our side too. After a couple of days of removing branches, the time had come to start work on the trunk:

... and before long, we were just left with the base and the roots:

That has now been mostly ground out and flattened, creating a massive pile of chippings:

At the end of this, I'm not sure whether we're actually going to be left with a usable driveway or not. Ideally we'd be able to drive our car up to our garage, independently of the house behind us, but it looks like the driveway still isn't going to be very level. Let's see.

Of course, we're very thankful that all this has been done without any sizeable bits of tree falling on the house! Whilst we're only renting, we do have all our stuff here, and I'd rather not have a massive bit of redwood falling on the place. It's also massively lighter in many rooms at the back of the house now. That said, at the same time it's a huge shame to lose such a titan of nature, which was obviously here before all the houses are built. In particular, while our house is known to be pretty old (1905-ish), the house behind is relatively new - in the UK there's no way you'd be allowed to build anywhere near such a tree.

While we might ridicule the village green preservation society in the UK, the attitude to nature is clearly different here: building is just the accepted order of things, economic growth trumps pretty much everything else, the car is king, and whilst California is very much at the forefront of the environmental lobby, there's still no problem for which MORE CONCRETE isn't the answer. Biodiversity here is amazing - the warmer weather sees to that - and Californians love their outdoors, but there still doesn't seem to be quite the value placed on it that we do in Europe. What's more, the built environment here just isn't pretty; it's functional, not beautiful, and European is a synonym for both quality and style across the board. Yet another interesting contrast that takes a little getting used to (and as a side note it's also worth noting that my boss's boss, and officemate, Urs Holzle, is a former WWF board member).

Now this isn't our tree, and we didn't decide to cut it down; at the same time, we feel slightly responsible and want to find a suitable charity which will plant several trees elsewhere as replacements. In that way, I hope we can honour this mighty tree.