Tag Archives: felling a tree

Adventures in Jungle Taming: Felling a Giant Royal Palm

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A Daunting Task

It’s not all planting flowers and building trails when it comes to taming our jungle. In this case, we had one of our favorite huge Royal Palm trees die of Thielaviopsis trunk rot. It’s a bummer because it was sort of the statement piece of this “room” in our botanical garden. This occurs when palms suffer some sort of trauma to their soft core such as tearing off palm fronds or wounding it in some other way. You know, the sort of thing a huge hurricane could do. After Maria all the surviving palms (the ones that didn’t get knocked over completely or bent in half like a straw), seemed to slowly come back replacing their fronds one by one. Including this one. But then a yellowing came over the spire and then the upper green trunk. The rot had been slowly and quietly eating away at the palm from the inside out. We kept thinking maybe it got struck by lightning and would grow back, but it never recovered. Finally the entire crown just fell off. If there is no crown, a palm can’t survive.

We contemplated just leaving the huge concrete-pole looking tree there, but we knew it would eventually start rotting away and pose a safety threat when it finally fell on its own, so we decided to chainsaw it down. Chainsawing is dangerous and even with a lot of experience, you can’t always predict where trees will fall. This one was a pretty scary job, and made this pregnant lady waddle away as fast a possible when the tree started coming right in my direction. Check out the video.

In the end it all worked out and we planted a new mango tree in its place. And the jungle grows on.


It smushed a mulberry tree, some bananas and heliconias, but we managed to save them


It stinks from all the rot inside!

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BK The Termite aka Chainsawing the Jungle

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I have really been enjoying the labor savings a chainsaw provides when clearing our property.  There is kind of an art to it as well.  I have read a few books/manuals on felling a tree as well as bucking it once it has fallen.  There are a few forces that aren’t covered in any of the manuals that I’ve come across here that adds an element of danger.  Vines.

The vines bind the trees at the top creating a hinge point that doesn’t allow the trees to fall as they normally would.  I’ve had trees that literally hang in mid air once  the trunk has been chopped.  The only way to get them down is to either wait for the wind to work them down, or to take the surrounding trees down with it as a group.  It requires a little more thinking and planning.

Still Standing
Algarrobos Tree (BK standing at the base)

Of course all the fun is over when the tree is on the ground, then the bucking and chopping starts to get it into manageable sizes.  The tree being cut down here is an Algarrobos and is about 60 foot tall.  These particular trees can grow up to 150 feet with a 6 foot diameter base.  I think the trunk on this one was maybe 12 inches in diameter.  We kept calling them “eyeglass case” trees because the fruit look like leather cases you would keep your eyeglasses in. The fruits are inedible, but the wood is more useful than most of the other weedy trees.

Eyeglass FruitEyeglass Case Looking Seed Pod

With the chainsaw as I said, you can make a hinge that will guide the tree where to fall.  This particular cut is going a little against how the tree would naturally fall, which is why we had to wait for the wind to take it.  The hinge technique worked perfectly and it fell exactly where I wanted it to.  It’s fun to learn and use new tools.

Once it is down the processing begins!  The trunk is straight and I think we can make use of it.  It is kind of sad to cut down a tree that has been growing for a long while.  We are connected to it in a way that I’ve never really thought of before.  I mean I’ve bought wood furniture, firewood, wood to make fences and build houses but I’ve never actually been a part of the process of killing it and chopping it up.  It makes you appreciate it more, just as growing fruit trees, vegetable seeds and animals make us appreciate our food much more. We feel so much more connected to everything here.

Hardwood

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