It was a windy old day in the middle of winter, and there weren't many people hanging around Lennox Gardens.
And, crucially, no weddings had been booked for a few weeks, which made it the ideal time to cut down some trees.
The trees in question, a stand of six majestic Himalayan cedars, have grown by the lake's edge near the Hyatt since the early 1960s, and were planted before the lake was even filled.
But in a few short days, they'll be gone, along with 30-odd other trees in the area that are too old, in poor health, dead or in decline.
It's all part of the evolution of a city that has gone from a treeless, scrubby plain to a carefully landscaped city filled with vistas, gardens and water features.
But back when the trees were first planted, there wouldn't have been many people booking the area for weddings.
The City and Environment Directorate's director of urban treescapes Rachael Dawes said it was worth noting what the place would have looked like when the cedars were first planted - open, bare and more or less featureless.
"It's a very harsh environment to grow trees, and Canberra's already hard even now we have this city monoculture of trees," she said.
"It's still hot, dry, cold, windy. The soils are awful. It's not an easy place."
All the more reason, she said, to nurture the many mature trees that have survived and thrived over Canberra's relatively short life.
The cedars haven't been doing well for some time, with many dead branches and a thick layer of needle on the surrounding ground.
Ms Dawes said many trees, especially those planted close together, relied on each other for sustenance and stability.
This meant they all had to come down at once.
"There are some structural issues, and because they were planted so close together, that's inhibited the trees nearby - they do lose all their lower limbs because of the shade," Ms Dawes said.
"So if you remove the external tree, you're just going to see dead sticks."
The scent of cedar wafted through the wind as heavy machinery removed the trees, a process that will take about a week.
As the trees are in the Nara Peace Park section of Lennox Gardens, they'll be replaced by Japanese black and white pines, which will be planted in the springtime and take around 15 years to fully mature.
Convenor of the Friends of Canberra-Nara Peace Park Chris Braddick said the cedars had played a role in the planning of the Japanese-influenced park in the 1990s.
"There's a concept in Japanese garden design whereby you 'borrow' the landscape, but you also obscure it so that you create a greater effect," he said.
"You do see it - where the bridge is, where those trees arched, was specifically so that most of the time you can't see it, and then suddenly you do."
Dr Braddick founded the friends around 13 years ago and is a professional Japanese garden designer.
He said the choice and placement of trees and the way they were pruned was crucial in maintaining an important part of Canberra's landscape.
"This is not the biggest Japanese garden in Australia, it's not the best Japanese garden in Australia, but it's our Japanese garden," he said, adding that the placement of rocks in the park's dry water course was "first rate".
Ms Dawes said plenty of planning went into the process of removing established trees, and the harvested wood would be reused as timber or mulch for government and community projects.
Lennox Gardens will remain open while the trees, including 20 over-mature Monterey cypress, three Black poplars and nine Radiata pines, are removed.
