SOMETIMES you can't see the wood for the trees. In our case, you can't see anything at all on account of the sent by the devil brambles. For something that is not supposed to be a tree, the humble bramble grows to an astonishing height. It has the power to cover entire buildings.

We found this out when we bought the ruins at the bottom of our garden. One building is no more than 10 metres away from the boundary of our land, but we had no idea what it looked like until we hacked through the hideously prickly brambles. I strimmed my way to the barn, with a heart full of hope. Our luck was in; the brambles were hiding a very pretty little barn, which will make a fine gîte for next year. Not only that, they were hiding a pedal-powered grinding stone, some very perished wellies and an assortment of trees.

It was the trees that posed a rather vexing problem. Most of them were not in too great a shape, having been strangled by undergrowth that was rapidly becoming overgrowth. Some of the fruit trees were definitely looking as if they could be near the end of the road.

Being a bit of a tree hugger, I decided that it was time to call in the expert. Enter Alex, the mid-Atlantic product of a Parisian mother and a father from Wyoming, raised in California and with the attitude to prove it. For a man whose profession requires a great deal of vertical travel, he takes being laid-back to the horizontal. His Zen calm laid flat four dead oaks at the bottom of our drive purely by emanation - well, that and the bright orange chainsaw that contrasted beautifully with his flower-patterned safety trousers. Then the fruit trees were given a haircut and a spruce that apparently will see them producing plums for years to come.

His next challenge was the mighty scots pine that had been blocking my view with its straggly old dead branches. I was fed up with looking at it, but didn't feel comfortable with the idea of cutting down something that was probably 100 years old, just because it didn't fit my view.

Before you could say Dylan from The Magic Roundabout, he had ropes out and was sat in the crown of the tree, sawing and pruning at incredible speed, all without apparently raising his heart rate above 10 beats per minute. The end result was a perfectly topiarised, life-size beautiful version of its formerly ugly self.

It is not very often that I am full of admiration for another person's work, but anybody who can fell a tree to within an inch of its intended drop zone and climb to the top of a tree without being terrified or breaking out into a sweat gets my vote.

So that'll be one half of the garden taken care of. I don't know if the other half will yield any treasures, but I know that it will certainly yield a few brambles. Onwards and upwards.