The opportunity to bash some tin is still sadly elusive right now. I have my builder starting in a couple of weeks to rebuild the parts of my new home which might fall down in the next strong wind and there is so much to do before he arrives! Which is how I came to lose my cherry.
I have a steel storage shed for my amazing vintage lawn-mower (keep an eye out for that story soon!) which was right where the builders need to be working, so I planned to move it further down the garden. I cleared a plot underneath the 50 foot cherry tree half way down the garden and got an early night as a summer squall came in, with the intention of moving the shed the next day. Come the morning there were two quite sizeable branches laying across the base for the shed.
We have long known that the tree was not in the best of health and planned to remove it in the future, after we have planted an orchard at the bottom of the garden. The birds and bees love the blossom and we wanted to make sure that they have a replacement habitat before they lost the old one. So we decided to prune back the dead branches.
Like anyone who is in to car restoration, I’m kind of used to cutting out the rot and finding that it just goes on and on. So I was dismayed but not surprised to find out a large portion of the tree was dead right back down the trunk. The tree overhung the neighbours boundary and we soon realised how lucky we were that it had not already ended up in their garden shed. So with great sadness we chased the rotten core all the way to the ground.
We wanted to utilise the stump and give something back to the wildlife, so I hollowed out a bowl and filled it with pebbles . Bees often drown in open water but by putting a bed of pebbles in there they can drink from a safe platform. If they do fall in they can easily make it back to safety. So we might have lost our cherry but the Bee Bar is open for business.
The Scuderia Obsoleto Blog 