Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Neil from Beechwood Tree Care. We’re out on site saving a blue atlas cedar by bracing and bolting it. I thought I’d show you what we’re up to. We’re in a lovely spot this morning, and our job is to repair this blue atlas cedar.
This is a twin-stem tree, and there’s a big crack between the stems. The likelihood is that the smaller, subservient stem is going to fall off.
We’ve reduced the side of the tree, and that was done really nicely by Flynn before we got here, so thank you Flynn. Now we’re here, myself and Rowan, and we’re going to bolt the tree and brace it. If I come into the main stem here, you can see that big split going up between the two stems.
Rowan’s putting some anchor points in up the top of the tree. We’re going to bolt through the stem here, and if you look up through the canopy, we’re going to brace the smaller stem. What we’re doing is giving it support. This tree needs this defect held together to allow it to repair itself.
If you look here, you’ll see a different type of growth compared to here. You can see the pinker wood and bigger fissures between the bark plates, which means it’s growing faster here than it is here. It’s doing that to deal with the defect.
But it’s moving and opening up, which means the crack can’t heal over. So we’re going to hold it still by drilling through the tree and putting bolts in, then adding a brace at the top. Here’s our big tool, and we’re going to drill through there. It’s an invasive method, and the cable bracing we’re using is non-invasive.
We’ll come back and show you what we’ve done.
We’re now at the stage where we’ve installed two bolts to hold the crack steady. They go right the way through the tree. We’ll trim off the ends to make them neat and tidy. They’ll eventually look like that.
Now we’re going up the tree to install the brace. Looking down on the union we bolted earlier, we’ve come up into the subdominant stem and installed a brace across to the main stem, as flat as we can get it. This is a dynamic brace, so it has some elasticity. It stretches and flexes but gives added support.
The tag in the middle shows the year of installation, so if it’s not us looking after the tree in the future, someone can see when it was installed. The bracing has an eight-year lifespan, so it won’t need replacing until 2033.
Here’s the finished job: one tree with a major defect that has now been remedied. Hopefully the tree will grow around that defect. When we come back in 10 years, we won’t see any bolts or a crack, just two stems going up and the tree looking as it should.
A tree pruned well still looks like a tree. Thanks for taking the time to watch. I hope it was informative and maybe we can save one of your trees.
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