You know you’re in deep shit when. . .
You’re moving in the wrong direction and something goes ‘CRUNCH’!
Until I moved to the West Coast (of the South Island, New Zealand) I had absolutely no idea that rhododendrons could be anything more than quaint ornamental garden shrubs and I’d certainly never entertained the notion that they could grow nearly as big as a house! The West Coast changed my perspective on a LOT of things, not least the humble and innocuous rhododendron.
As discussed in my previous article, linked above, my property when I first moved into it was ridiculously overburdened with trees. One of those trees was a rhododendron and not a shrub of a rhododendron but a veritable behemoth of a rhododendron. This grandpappy of a tree towered almost as high as the roof peak, its canopy stretched out over a circumference of about twenty feet and the base alone measured six feet across after we’d finally (by hand) hacked all the top branches away. It was a BALL of roots and branches and aerials and runners and it occupied the entire breadth of the kitchen/ bathroom wing of the…
