Two cedars beside a house, one hollow at the core

Two cedars stood hard against the side of the house. Not near it — against it. The canopy of one sat on the roofline and the trunk of the other had grown so tight to the eave that there was no gap to work a saw into from the ground.

That ruled out felling. There was no drop zone on that side of the house, so neither tree could be taken whole in any direction.

One of the two was hollow. Nothing showed from outside — full crown, sound bark, no lean. It showed in the cut face: good sapwood wrapped around a rotted, empty center. Redcedar around Corryton roots into six or eight inches of soil over limestone, and a hollow stem on a shallow root plate is how a tree that looks healthy ends up on a roof after one hard gust.

Both came down the same way. A climber went up, roped in, and took each tree apart from the top in sections small enough to control on the way down. Limbs first, then the spar, cut by cut, until there was nothing left standing to fall the wrong way. Plywood and ground protection went down over the lawn and the deck surround before anything heavy landed on it.

Every section was loaded onto the truck. All of it left the property. Two days, start to finish.

The photographs on this page are the before, the during and the after of that job, including the cut face of the hollow one. The clip was shot from the climber’s helmet, near the top of the second cedar. This was one of the first jobs Leo’s Tree Service ever ran, and it is the one that got filmed.