23/02/2026
Jahsiah and I recently had the opportunity to visit a tree I hadn’t seen in 12 years.
Standing at the rear of a property in Gloucester, this mature Silver Birch is the central feature of the owner’s garden and offers great amenity value to the local neighbourhood.
I was involved in pruning this lovely Birch when it had grown so much that it was starting to outgrow its position in the garden and was taking up a lot of space and blocking quite a bit of daylight.
Wanting some daylight and a view of the sky back, the owner asked us in to see what we could do. They dearly wanted to keep the tree but knew that they needed professional help to take on the task.
We were back to repeat the pruning process. The tree had gradually grown back to its former size and was now in need of our attention again.
Not bad value when you think that the previous investment lasted for a dozen years!
We get to prune a lot of Birch trees each year, and we are very proficient at it, as you can imagine, yet even with the experience that we have, each one we prune has its own character and its own set of challenges.
Birches are naturally quite a subtle tree, with a gentle light and airy form, and their branch tips are fine and delicate. Because of this, it’s important to prune them in a way that leaves them looking as natural as possible and encourages them to put on re-growth that is sympathetic to the eye and sympathetic to future pruning in the future.
In our travels, we do come across many badly pruned Birch trees, where almost every branch has been lopped off in line with the tree’s outer silhouette, and to be honest, they look awful, with the branch ends being a mix of fine natural tips and a lot of thick stumps. Not only is this unsympathetic pruning, but it means the regrowth is unnaturally thick and dense, and the tree soon starts to resemble a big silver toilet brush!
The aim of the game is to avoid any pruning cuts on the outer silhouette of the canopy. The way we do this is to reduce the canopy size by the removal of the heavier, thicker stems completely, leaving the natural internal live growth to become the new outer growth of the canopy.
On younger trees that only require a small amount of material to be removed, this isn’t too difficult, but on more mature trees that require a harder reduction in canopy size, this can prove more challenging, as the internal growth can be sparse, meaning we have less choice of material to work with.
Having said that, we can usually find a way to get this right one way or another.
Our mature Birch tree in Gloucester is a prime example of this, as you can see in the photos. We had to reduce the tree by about 40% in overall size, which meant removing the last 12 years-worth of growth, leaving any suitable internal material available to form the new canopy.
Jahsiah was the man up the tree on this job. He did a great job of carefully removing all the larger stems without damaging the soft internal growth that we needed to leave.
With fences on each side of the garden, a neighbour’s roof and various other garden obstacles, he expertly avoided doing any damage by either carefully dismantling the stems into manageable hand-held pieces and dropping them down into a safe zone or by attaching them to a lowering rope for me to lower them to the floor in a controlled manner.
We cleared away all the fine branch material and chipped it for use as biomass, and the thicker wood we cut into logs for our customer to use in their wood burner. We were also able to find a long enough piece of branch wood for our customer to use as a rustic banister, a request fulfilled that I’ve never been asked for before!
At the end of our day, the tree was back to the size we’d left it all those years ago, the garden was left tidy, and our customer had a view of the sky again and more daylight to enjoy in their garden.
If I haven’t retired by then, I might well be back in another twelve years’ time!
Steve
