Jack Tame: My cabbage tree had to go

Never again. 

Two and a half years on, the memory still engenders a physical reaction. 

The time I found some guys to lightly trim the trees in my backyard, at my neighbour’s request. I figured it made sense just to leave the lads and their chainsaws to it while I went to work, only to return home to discover they’d hacked my beautiful trees back to stumps. 

It was and remains my biggest, most painful mistake as a homeowner. I’ve got a knot in my stomach just thinking about it now. And understandably through the tears that were shed, I agreed with my wife. Never. Again. 

Alas, a cabbage tree in my back yard has been ailing for some time. It’s been dropping branches and its trunk has been quite obviously eroding away, with big chunks at its base turning to dust. I took some photos and sought the opinion of some gardening experts online, and the response was unanimous. The tree was a safety hazard. It had to go.   

This will come as a great surprise I’m sure, but I’m not someone who’s spent a lot of time doing manual labour. My hands are those of a middle-aged man who’s spent most of his life at a desk in a nice climate-controlled office. At 39, I’m not sure I’d ever held a chainsaw, let alone used one. 

Opinion was divided. Was this a job for an expert? Or was this a job for a trip to Hirequip and a couple of YouTube tutorials? Perhaps scarred by the last time I had strangers with chainsaws on the property, I decided to do it myself. 

By chainsaw standards, the one I hired was not particularly impressive. For starters, it was electric. Nothing like the ones from the master lumberjacks whose tutorials I’d watched online. Nevertheless, I will admit to feeling a little thrill the first time I fired it up and felt its blade begin to cycle. It was a little bit like firing a gun for the first time. A felt a little shiver of power. 

The tree, I figured, was a bit like my aging body in that it carried weight in strange places. Even though cabbage trees can be spindly things, some of the upper branches can be surprisingly dense. A rotting tree can carry a bit of water. I was well aware that I needed to avoid bringing it down on myself. If I thought the previous tree episode was an ugly sight, a tree-chainsaw-middle-aged-dad-collision would set a new and gruesome standard. 

Piece by piece, I attacked it. Purposefully. The sawdust sprayed over me and caked my hair. My arms glistened with sweat. And though you might be expecting this to be the part of the story where it all inevitably went catastrophically, bloodily, limb-threateningly wrong, it didn’t. 

I brought down the tree. I cut it into pieces. I removed the stump and lay down some grass seed while I decide what to grow next. 

It was, it has to be said, an uncharacteristic success. 

The real danger, of course, is that when my wife points to the slowly-recovering trees in our backyard and recalls the terrible trauma —never again!—  there’s a now little part of me that recalls the feeling of that chainsaw revving in my hands. Well... never say never.