Trees can be a beautiful part of your garden landscape, but only when they grow properly. In an ideal world, your trees will grow perfectly upright and be nowhere near your home or your garden fence. Unfortunately, this rarely happens! Instead, you can end up with trees that grow at an angle, or ones that grow really close to your house or the fence. To make matters worse, you can’t stop a tree from growing. So, you eventually end up with one that’s very overgrown.
In this situation, you’ve got something that doesn’t look particularly nice but it might also present a safety hazard. A large tree growing towards your house can end up damaging your property. Similarly, if it grows too close to your fence, it could cause safety concerns for passers-by or your neighbors.
How to Deal With an Overgrown Tree
With that in mind, how do you deal with an overgrown tree? Here are three tips:
1 – Trim the tree (if it is safe for you to do so!)
Trimming the tree can be all that’s required to deal with it. This does depend on how big the tree is, but if you’re able to safely reach the branches and trim them with your usual garden tools, then it’s fine to do some DIY here. Just take the necessary safety precautions and avoid using anything that might be a bit risky – like a chainsaw. A lot of smaller and thinner trees that have become overgrown can be trimmed back and left in a much better place, solving your problem.
2 – Contact a tree expert for advice
If trimming the tree is either not possible or doesn’t work, your next tip is to contact some tree experts. There are plenty of companies offering tree services that you can call and invite to your home. Here, they will assess the tree and let you know the best course of action. Sometimes, this might mean they trim it for you. But, because the tree is really big – and the branches are thick – they have to use chainsaws and other tools. Letting the pros handle this is smart as it means there’s less chance of anything bad happening. They can safely operate the tools while also ensuring that the heavy branches don’t fall on anything or anyone.
3 – Chop down the overgrown tree
Following your consultation with the tree experts, they might say that the only thing to do is remove the tree. This often happens when a tree is growing in an odd way. If it’s growing at an angle straight into your home, chopping it down is the only way to prevent it from eventually growing straight into your property. Or, if the tree is unhealthy and starting to rot, chopping it down can make sense. This leaves you without the annoying overgrown tree in your garden!
The Takeaway: You Must Deal with an Overgrown Tree, But You Might Need Helping Hands
Realistically, you should follow these tips as though they are three steps. Step one is to see if you can trim the tree yourself. If that doesn’t help, move to step two – which is to bring some professionals in. If they can’t solve the problem by trimming back some branches, then step three will be required: felling the tree.
On her downtime, Shashika enjoys container gardening on her rooftop and shares her bounty with friends and neighbors.
