Remove An Overgrown Vine From A Tree, step by step

(Punny alternate post title: Heard It Through The Giant Non-Grape Vine)

Ok, so remember the ol’ crazyvine that was putting the squeeze on an oak tree in our backyard that we mentioned last fall? It is a scene straight outta Jumanji.

About half a year ago we cut the base of the vine…

… in an attempt to kill it and rescue our oak tree from its death grip.

And then it simply sat there, a la Rose in Titanic. It never let go. And things took a turn for the ugly when the leaves and branches got all dry and dead.

So after 6 months of waiting for it to give up the ghost and magically fall from the tree, we chose that we’d need to take matters into our own hands… with the assist of some pruning shears. In short our method was to clip each dead branch off right at the base where it met the vine since we could not wrestle the vine itself from the tree (it was literally as firm as cement on there, and we did not want to damage the oak).

Miraculously we could reach nearly every last branch thanks to a ladder and a long handled branch cutter for those upper portions.

Here is a before shot for ya from last year:

And an after that I simply snapped this morning:

It is pleasant to no longer have what appears to be a tree that is eating the house.

One more before:

And an after from that angle now:

I enjoy that there is not a giant vine weighting down the oak anymore, and the new openness of the upper patio is excellent. It used to feel fairly closed in – and so many berries and pointy leaves (both of which the vine produced en mass) used to fall all over the table and chairs. It is pleasant to be free of that dusting o’ junk.

So that is how you ignore a vine for a few years, then attack the base, then wait for it to surrender and fall to the ground by some vine-miracle, and then make things happen with some shears and a ladder. Any pruning or yard stuff going on in your neck of the woods?