Our Wee Farm

Mighty Oak

We were down in Auckland seeing Penny and Alan off. :O( We'd had a wonderful night, staying in the Hilton and having dinner at the French cafe.

When we got home Lloyd and I were standing on the deck chatting away when we heard this incredibly loud crack. I was facing the garden and Lloyd said I looked a bit like this.....

(yes very flattering!) This is my 'panic' face!

What had happened was that a seemingly healthy, huge, branch had cracked right off our oak tree.
Making a right mess of the lawn!
I don't like to think what could have happened if anyone was under it. We play with the dogs there all the time.

See how brown the grass is getting.

What you really can't tell from the photos is the huge scale of it. The oak tree is about 120ft tall and wider still. It swamps everything, even our house. To put it into perspective the small trees that you can see behind the oak are about 20ft tall.

The arborist is coming today to clean it up and have a look over the tree. We're really hoping he puts it down to the drought and the heat and not the fact that the tree is dying. That would be BAD news. It's really special to us, it's what made us want to buy our wee farm and the house is named after it. It's also one of the oldest trees in the area.

UPDATE
the tree man has been and the news is not great. The tree is rotting from the inside. Come winter there are a couple of branches that will probably need to come off. We've to keep an eye on it. There's really nothing else we can do - lots of options were discussed, but the tree man said that they are expensive and really won't do any long term good so advised against them. We'll surely outlive our Oak now. If we can get a few more years out of it we'll be happier, but it was very sad news.

following day
Right the branch is all cut up and the Oak has been tidied up, Daniel the arborist made a lovely job, then Lloyd spent hours working really hard in the roasting heat to tidy it all up. He saw the hugest centipede in the world!