Last saturday I pruned the tree in the back yard. It is a paardenkastanje (in English, a horse chestnut). Which means it is a tree that’s decidedly unsuited to a medium sized backyard, especially a backyard with neighbours. The darn thing grows and grows and grows. Very suited as a big, impressive tree in the middle of a town square or park.
So the previous house owners (or, I suspect, the neighbours, as the previous owners didn’t seem to be capable of maintenance) sometimes chopped off branches to keep the tree within limits. We moved 1.5 year ago, so I thought it time to do some pruning myself.
Now, such a horse chestnut is really not intended to be pruned and not intended to be kept in check. So any sawing that I was about to do would probably leave the tree looking a bit disheveled. Well, nothing to do about it except limiting the amount of work I do on it. Better to leave some branches for next year’s chopping.
This is a before/after picture:
Especially in the middle of the tree, branches are missing. So I hope that the tree still looks good next spring when the leaves come out.
After the sawing I still had to clean up the branches I took out. Pretty impressive heap:
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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