I know someone outside of London(Sandown/Esher area) related to the estate owner I work for. I occasionally go over to their awesome Tudor house in the burbs to clean up their garden. Anywho, they have the largest single piece of marble top I have ever seen. Something like 4 foot by 9 as their kitchen island. It looked lovely seeing such a large contiguous piece of marble.
Yeah, they need to prune that cherry tree. Behind it is a guest house. On the other side of the property out of camera view is a bungalow where I stayed for a week. It was such a nice place, I almost didn't want to leave
I just realised if you zoom in you can see the climbers gear in the copper beech on the right as well as the rest of the limb at the base. I had to put a climber in to the tree since the spar broke off half way up. They left it long enough we had to nearly completely remove the limb to prevent the rot from getting to the trunk. Actually, the climber went much further than I asked him to. But that's another story..ugh...climbers.... anyways
To balance it, we had to relieve a good deal of a limb from the back of the tree that was sticking out at a stupid angle from the crotch. Man, I hate removing so much from a mature tree - especially a huge mature tree. But it was so improperly pruned as it grew, we had no choice. A beech likes to have several branches sticking out at nearly perpendicular angles out of a good core. Let me find a pic...
OK now this youngish European beech has been basically untouched. You can see how it has a big trunk with branches coming out the side - the copper beech grows similarly(though I have seen them have even more numerous and smaller branches):
That canopy will naturally keep the lower branch size in check, and is already causing a few limbs to die back, and it will grow in to a big beautiful bastard. How they pruned that copper beech guaranteed it would die by breaking limbs instead of old age.
Also a word of advice, prune your baby trees early, often(every year for 3-4 yrs), and correctly. And within just a few short years, you may never have to prune it again ever for to be healthy. Also, never top or pollard a tree unless the tree was basically planted in the wrong place to begin with.
Begin of diatribe 2 -
London Plane trees, aka sycamores, are hugely popular trees in cities in the UK and Ireland. It's a cross between an American sycamore and an asian one. You have likely seen a fair few of them yourselves stateside. They are gorgeous trees that are long lived. That is, until you plant them in a city. They grow decently quick and they grow decently big. These things want to grow to be 100 feet tall on average - and in the right environment it can grow much bigger still. Does this sound like the kind of tree you want on a sidewalk? It isn't. So what they do here is they pollard the crap out of it - cutting all the limbs back as much as they dare. Now what you have is a big tree forced in to pretending to be a small tree.
Do those look like healthy trees to you? I mean, that freakin street isn't even big enough for two healthy plane trees to be across from each other, let alone the sidewalk. I mean, just look at that bark. Plane trees normally have a smooth flakey appearance. Between butchering their prime means of photosynthesis and forcing them to regrow it, creating dozens of spaces for vectors and pathogens to invade, where water and debris can collect, they also have very little means for the roots to gather water and grow a strong root system, and all this while the concrete chokes their trunk - what chance do they have? Add in all manner of pollution and they all nearly look as sickly as these guys above.
But most people in a city grow up looking at 'trees' like this. How would they know better?
OK, rant off...for now...
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