There are lots of trees, mostly oaks, on the field boundaries here and late December and January are the times that the farmers maintain them. Tree maintenance French style is rather brutal, the farmers work from a platform mounted on the forks of their tractor and the trees are, if they are lucky, pollarded or, if unlucky, shaved back to a single stem with a comical small bunch of leaf growth left at the top (colloquially known as a sap puller). As with many things in France it makes sense if you know the background to how wood rights worked 200 years ago. The land owner had the rights to the trees and the major branches, the tenants to the forest of thin epicormic growth that the trees sent out in desperation believing that their last days had come (these were cut, bundled together into faggots (fagots in French)).
Real tree surgeons who climb in France are rather rare and often prohibitively expensive - both times previously we had used ex-pats working over here - and so we jumped at the chance to engage someone who lived 500m away from us. I had undertaken to handle the wood once it was cut down so Aymeric could concentrate on the aerial work but, as always, underestimated the mass of timber that comes out of a tree that is being pruned, repaired and crown-lifted. We soon found our élagueur was a fast worker and quick climber - here he is working in the tall oak that had suffered its rupture estivale:
And, in this picture, the size and scale of the tree are apparent as Aymeric works at the top.
Our tree surgeon also took some pictures of our property from his lofty perch:
Photo credit Aymeric MARTIN, EURL Les Jardins Suspendus
Back on the ground we took eight days to process the timber that came down in a day and a half of our fast working élagueur.
