Video Transcript
A little job today. We’ve got Oli and Flynn out on site and they’re repollarding some willows. So this willow has a strange look about it because it’s been pollarded many times by us. It’s actually totally hollow. So repollarding it saves the tree. There is also a second one, two doors down, which has also been pollarded by us many times.
Pollarding is taking off all of that leggy growth and pruning it right back to what we call a knuckle. So you can see in there, there are some gnarly bits, which kind of look like a knuckle, and that’s where we’ll be taking it back to. The guys will leave one to two inch stubs in old money. 25 to 50 ml little stubs, and that helps the tree regenerate and resprout from there.
There’s quite a difference between pollarding and topping. Pollarding is a kind of ancient technique. If you go to America, they’re very like, what? But here it’s very, very commonly used. There’s lots of theories about why we pollard our trees. I think there was a tree found in the Trent, which is a river near Nottingham, and it was a pollard knuckle. They carbon dated it and it was over 5,000 years old.
Just looking at this one here, you can see this hollowing. So there’s a big branch that we’ve pruned off a long, long time ago, and it’s totally hollow. How long we will be able to continue maintaining this tree remains to be seen because a big crack has developed on the other side. So I think the likelihood is this will have to be repollarded every couple of years, and it might get to a point where it just gets deemed too unstable. But for the time being, the customer really wants to retain it.
The sites are all set up. Oli and Flynn have got themselves all organised and they’re just starting to repollard that first Willow. They’re using our cherry picker, our MEWP here because that’s the simplest and most effective method and the safest as it can’t be done from ground level. You could climb this tree, but then you’ve got no anchor point above where you are stood. You wouldn’t really want to climb this one. So you’re gonna use the cherry picker here, and they’re gonna prune the tree from that. Chip off all the branches and then have a nicely repollarded tree.
It’s some great work by Oli and Flynn. Two very satisfied customers. Trees have been pollarded. Now we often say pollarding is like marmite, you either love it or hate it. Oli’s just finishing off there, blowing up and tidying up, and hopefully he’s gonna leave the garden neater than he found it.
Here’s the finished pollard. So all of that growth which is only two years old has been taken back to what we call knuckles. We have left some stubs which allow regrowth, and this basically gives you a short squat tree. As we said before, it is like marmite, you either love it or hate it. I quite like it. It’s a British thing, and a European thing actually too.
There’s lots of reasons or lots of theories as to why we pollard trees. I think the most likely one was that it was used to manage and then used as fodder for animals. Probably not on willows like this.
That gives you a really good view of those gnarly knuckles that have formed over those years and repollarding. The boys have done a great job, even in some horrible conditions. We’ll come back and have a look at these, and by next spring these will have already started to sprout and they’ll be putting that growth back on. It’s a really good way of managing these trees.
A little interesting fact here is that this tree was planted when the house was built, and the house was built in 1966, and our customer was the first owner. They just told me the house cost £4,999. We don’t often know how old a tree is, but that one is 1966.
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