During the summer we started to get to grips with the garden, well, just scratching the surface really. We had made two important decisions about our strategy prior to this, firstly, we realised that we would never have the skill, time or passion to return it to its former glory as a National Garden Scheme open garden. Secondly we decided that while we want a nice space outside if we are going to spend lots of time and effort doing the garden we want it to give us back as much as we can (you porbably guessed this from our massive veg cage).
Part of our plan (to be revealed later) is to reduce the number of overgrown flower beds that are currently in the garden, along with this we wanted to have a large spruce removed to let in a bit more light - enter Barry the local tree man.
On a whim we asked him to retain about five foot of the trunk when he took the tree down with some whimsical idea about carving a throne style seat from it at some point in the future. Unfortunately and despite the trees large size once the trunk was exposed we realised it would be too narrow for that purpose.
Undaunted we rang a friend who is an excellent amateur carver and told him we wanted an Ed.
He used a small electric chainsaw to remove some of the larger bits of waste wood from our proposed design which had been rather professionally drafted onto the trunk with a lot of wonky marker pen lines.
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| Removing the waste |
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| Starting to take shape |
With an hour or so here and there over a week or two I got to the point where the shaping was done. We dumped some oil on it to protect the wood and by rights should have spent time sanding out all the tool marks - that hasn't happened yet and I actually quite like the rough finish so maybe it never will. The wood has really darkened up now but the features are still easily visible - here's a photo of it whilst it was light coloured just after the shaping.
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| Ed. |
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