i newspaper, April 25, 2017
(48 words) The obvious unanswered question here is why are they felling it? It took a few seconds to find the answer: because it is dead. And isn’t the George Washington line more interesting than ‘Workers have started . . . ‘ or indeed ‘Crews started the task’? You can take it as read that a tree will be felled by workers. This is how I would do it:
A 600-year-old tree under which George Washington had a picnic is being felled. The white oak next to Basking Ridge Presbyterian church in Bernards, New Jersey, was declared dead last year. A 25ft sapling from one of its acorns is growing nearby. (44 words)
The heading is pedestrian. How about:
Farewell to the
Washington oak