It was growing out of a stand of bamboo, Sasa palmata and the base of the trunk shattered with half of the bowl lifting and half remaining in the ground. It fell in an Easterly direction completely crossing over our right hand neighbours’ garden and going well into their right hand neighbours’ property.
Today we have removed the root bowl of the Magnolia. We used a technique we have used on other fair sized tree stumps in the past.
We did this today without digging out the bowl by sawing the exposed half again lengthwise and splitting this in half again. We pulled each quarter away from the rest with a small hand winch.
This larger growing form of the ‘Willow Leaved Magnolia, Magnolia salicifolia var. arborea, was planted over forty years ago and was purchased from The Seville Garden. It had reached approximately thirty five feet in height and was carrying hundreds of flower buds.
With our son Paul and another neighbour, Dave’s help, Linda and I managed to clear next door’s garden, shred the smaller branches and cut up the trunk into splitable lengths.
The storm also blew a bird feeder out of a shrub just outside our kitchen window, spilling the seed on the path. A field mouse is pictured below, taking advantage of the sudden windfall, in broad daylight (2.00pm).
We are sorry we had problems with the web site over three days, Tuesday to Thursday of this week. We have put it down to glitches in an updated piece of software.
Anyway, we did not escape unscathed from last Monday morning’s storm. One of our largest hybrid Magnolias, ‘Royal Crown’ broke off at about 10 feet up the trunk.
It had many hundreds of flower buds and it has been quite sad shredding all the brushwood and cutting up the trunk and branches. However, in our experience with Magnolias, the remaining four foot of undamaged trunk will sprout vigorously next spring, and before too many years have passed we will get flowers again. It may take a while to get back to its previous dimensions of perhaps 30ft high by as much through, which is perhaps not a bad thing! There was some good news about the tree falling, in that not a single shrub underneath it was damaged significantly by its falling. In fact the very minor damage occurred mostly in the clear up, while cutting and dragging off the tree branches from out of a large Mahonia ‘Winter Sun’ and various Camellias and other shrubs.
The other tree blown completely out of the ground was a venerable cooking apple ‘Monarch’, planted by my father in the 1930s.
The old tree had been covered with a substantial Climbing Hydrangea (H. petiolaris), and no doubt this was a major contributory factor to it being blown down. The hydrangea has come right out of the ground as well. We haven’t finished the clearing up of this one so don’t know the full extent of collateral damage of under planted shrubs but we think it may be worse than the insignificant damage of the bigger tree.
This is not the first tree to have been blown over because of the extra wind resistance of climbing plants supported by them. . A few years ago, we lost a completely healthy Prunus serrula in winter time when it had no leaves because of a large evergreen climber, Stauntonia hexandra which it hosted. The tree had been a fair size with a trunk close to a foot through.