A building site arrives with trees already on it. Almost always the quickest thing to do is cut them down, and almost always somebody regrets it about eighteen months later, when the structure is finished and the grounds look like they were laid last week — because they were.
On the Noah site we did the other thing. The trees were lifted, held, and put back.
Why it is worth the trouble
A mature tree is the one element of a garden you cannot buy at the end. Everything else — planting, turf, lighting, a water feature — can be installed in weeks and will look established inside a year or two. Canopy cannot. A tree with fifteen years in it gives a site scale and shade immediately, and there is no budget that shortcuts it.
For a hotel or a villa that matters commercially, not just aesthetically. Shade is what makes an outdoor area usable in April. A new sapling gives you shade in a decade.
What it actually involves
The photograph on this page is the middle of it, and it is not glamorous. The sequence is roughly:
- Assess the tree before anything moves. Species, trunk diameter, age, and crucially how the root system has grown — a tree in shallow soil over laterite has spread sideways, which helps; one that has driven down into a crack has not.
- Root-prune in advance where there is time. Cutting the outer roots some weeks before the lift encourages fine feeder roots to develop closer in, and it is those, not the thick anchor roots, that keep the tree alive afterwards.
- Reduce the canopy. This is the part clients dislike. The tree comes back with a fraction of its roots, so it cannot support the leaf it had. If you do not cut the top back, the tree does it for you, unevenly.
- Lift with the root ball intact. The ball is the tree. Break it and you have a large piece of firewood standing upright.
- Replant at the right depth, brace it, and water it through the first dry season even when it looks dead. It will look dead. It usually is not.
The honest part
This does not always work. Some trees decline for a year and then fail. The odds are decided mostly at step one, which is why the assessment matters more than the machinery, and why anyone who quotes to move a tree without looking at it first is guessing.
It is also slower than clearing. If the programme has no room in it, the answer is to clear and plant new — and to accept that the grounds will take years to read as established.
Where there is room, though, it is the cheapest mature planting anybody will ever buy, because the tree is already there and already paid for.
Where this comes up
Almost always on sites that are still under construction, which is exactly when landscaping is least likely to be in the room. The decision about the trees gets made by whoever is clearing the plot, months before a landscape designer is appointed. By then it has been made.
If you are building in Goa and there are trees on the plot, that is the conversation worth having early — well before the planting one.
