I had to do some tree surgery the other day as there are a bunch of sycamores that can get a bit tall and block the signal to our satellite dish - not a problem my grandad ever had, but times change.

I’m no pruning expert and I recall years ago carefully studying the art of rose pruning. We were in South Africa at the time and one day I drive past a rose farm and saw a tractor with a cutter bar trimming the plants off at knee height. Not much science there, so I gave up with the painstaking procedure of carefully finding a bud and so on. I’m a bit of a tough love gardener as a result.

Anyway, fighting brambles (is there anywhere they won’t grow) I was hacking bits off the tree to restore my options to watch football and reflecting on trees in general. They really are amazing things. Trees provide natural fertiliser and a big tree will drop up to a tonne of leaves each year (tell me about it). About two per cent of the trees in the UK are classed as ancient woodland, pre-dating the 1600’s and our oldest tree is thought to be a yew in Scotland, thought to be 3,000 years old.

If you hang a bird feeder on a tree, it won’t get higher as the tree grows because trees grow from the top. In fact, different parts of the tree grow at different times of the season. Usually the foliage is first, then the trunk and the roots last.

Given a big tree might have five to eight tonnes of useable wood, it’s incredible to think that about 6,000 oak trees were used in building HMS Victory. Given the British Navy was estimated to have about 300 ships in it around 1800, that’s a huge amount of trees bobbing about on the waves. But it does make me respect trees a bit more, they are really fundamental to our way of life. And they are at their best now.

• Fred Knobbit is a nature blogger. He grew up in the Pennines in Lancashire on the edge of an industrial town but is now safely in Cornwall. You can read his archive at www.bodminblogger.com