A few weeks ago I had a visit from a local gardener who prunes trees and takes the cuttings for use by a florist. I’m not sure exactly how it all works, but I have had visits from someone like him before, years ago when I used to live here before Sydney. They usually give you a token amount of money for allowing them to take the branches. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just happy for someone other than myself to prune the camelia trees, since they are so large.
So, the guy visited a few weeks ago, but when he got a closer look at the trees he said they weren’t in good condition, with hail and other damage, and he didn’t end up wanting to prune them since he wouldn’t be able to use the cuttings. He recommended cutting about 3 feet off the top and 2 feet off the sides of the trees.
I decided to take his advice and give them a big prune. In the end I only did one tree last week, and Andrew did the other three on the weekend. We had a deadline of yesterday if we wanted the bits we chopped off to be collected in the council hard rubbish collection that we have happening this week. We got it all done, though we really didn’t have a lot of idea how to prune camellia trees. To me it looks good….the trees are thinned out, our front lawn now gets more light (it was rather dark and damp before), and I have faith that the bare patches will be filled in in time. I hope we haven’t done any lasting damage to the 50-year-old trees, but I do believe that camellia trees like being cut back. Unfortunately we did also cut down an old birds nest that was being used by a cute ring-tail possum. Hopefully he will find another home that isn’t our roof.
