Where we live most people have small gardens, often concreted over, or live in flats. And not many can afford to have play equipment in their garden. Our church was recently given a generous grant towards having a playground installed in our grounds. It will mainly be used by the young children who attend our toddler group.
As part of the project, some trees in the churchyard had to be trimmed back. As I came back from the school run yesterday, the tree surgeons were hard at work. And they were shredding lots of the wood. We have wood burning stoves in the vicarage and we’d been promised the logs. So I went to check that they weren’t chipping all the lovely holly wood. They assured me they weren’t but then started asking about which other trees needed pruning. This was definitely outside my field of knowledge.
The Vicar was out at a prayer meeting, so it was back to the vicarage to “phone a friend”. I got it right first time by calling the churchwarden who then came over to talk trees whilst I made tea for the workers.
The logs came over our wall later on. And the Vicar spent a lovely hour after tea chopping and splitting them with some local teenagers who thought they’d come over to use our trampoline.
The Vicar's Wife 
You’re really stock-piling those logs! Will keep you nice and cosy in the winter. We are thinking of putting a tree in our garden to replace the silver birch that we cut down because it had got too big for the garden. We are looking for something that will be nice for birds but not too much trouble for us. One bonus of not having the tree at the moment is that the local cats can’t get over the fence!