Tree Felling in Sea Point, Cape Town

What tree work in Sea Point actually involves

The trees we deal with most in Sea Point

Sea Point isn't really a suburb of garden trees, it's a suburb of buildings, so the trees sit in three places. There are the palms along the promenade and the street verges, dropping heavy fronds onto a pavement that has people on it all day. There are the courtyard and parking-bay trees inside the blocks, nearly always planted too close to a wall and now lifting the paving they were set into. And there are the older figs and ornamentals in the handful of freestanding gardens left, whose roots go hunting for the drains. What almost all of them share is a history of being topped badly by somebody with a ladder. The regrowth that comes back after a topping cut is fast, heavy and weakly attached — and that regrowth is what tears out in the wind.

Getting to the tree: access on Sea Point properties

Reaching a tree in Sea Point is more a logistics problem than a climbing one. There's usually no driveway to a back garden because there is no back garden — the tree stands in a courtyard with the block on three or four sides and nothing can be dragged out. So we rig it, lower it in short pieces onto a mat, and carry it out through the entrance hall or a service passage. Out front, the truck and chipper need a legal spot on a road that's busy from early morning, so we set the timing with the building rather than just pitching up. Where it's a body corporate we quote through the trustees or managing agent and give residents notice, because the parking bays under the tree have to be cleared and that goes far better with a day's warning than on the morning.

Wind, weather and what it does to Sea Point trees

Sea Point takes the Atlantic head-on with nothing in front of it. Salt is the constant — it's in the air every day, not only in a storm. It scorches new growth, kills the tips on anything not suited to the coast, and eats through the steel in braces and guy wires much faster than a few kilometres inland. On top of that, the winter north-westerly fronts come in off the sea and hit the seafront blocks first, while the summer south-easter funnels along the street lines between buildings, which speeds it up rather than breaking it. Trees standing in that funnel grow leaning and one-sided. It's why so much of the work here is taking weight out of a crown rather than shaping it.

Permissions and protected trees around Sea Point

The one that catches Sea Point residents out is the palms. The palms on the promenade, the pavements and the road reserve belong to the City of Cape Town, not to the building they happen to stand outside. If one is dropping fronds onto the pavement, the route is an application to the City — not a contractor with a chainsaw, however fair the complaint. Inside your boundary the usual rules apply: most planted palms and ornamentals can be removed without a permit, while nationally protected indigenous species under section 12 of the National Forests Act need a licence. In a sectional-title scheme there's a second layer. A tree on common property is the body corporate's call, so we need the trustees' sign-off before it goes in the diary.