Timber!

This was the south-west corner of the site before the build began, with the most enormous compost heap and a leyland cypress tree. Goodness knows how long the heap had been here but you can see how high it was and it was way too big for me to move on my own, so it's been bugging me ever since we moved in. This week the eyesore has gone and the final part of the clearance was the removal of the cypress.

It wasn't the most beautiful of trees and because it's an evergreen it was going to be a problem  in the winter as it would block the sun so it had to go. It took the tree surgeons just over 15 minutes to take the tree from this:

to this.

The orange machine to the left of the JCB is the shredder and all the tree was fed into it and turned into chippings apart from a series of logs that I'll keep on site. The removal of the tree and the compost heap has cleared a massive new area and this is where the pond and wildlife area are going to go in the new garden - plus a much smaller, deciduous native tree that supports more species than the cypress, maybe a crab apple.