The latest wealth flex for your home? Big old trees
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Environmental Design’s residential crane placing a large boxed tree into a backyard.
PHOTO: Environmental Design, Inc./Facebook
Guy Trebay
Imagine lifting a chair and moving it to a corner of the living room. Now imagine that the chair is 15m tall and weighs 100 tonnes. That, or something very like it, is the daily task of specialised workers who uproot and replant trees that may have been saplings when Ronald Reagan was a child.
“Every day, that’s what we do,” said Tom Cox, a co-founder of Environmental Design, a company in Texas that sources and transplants some of the largest and heaviest trees in the world. “People who can afford it want the biggest, and they want the best in everything, and they want it now.”