Another beauty Sam ! You seem to have a lot of these spectacular Bougies, I bet its a lot of work keeping up with all of them ? If it gets to be too much you could send me one to lessen your burden.
The carving looked over done to me and the see through hole is way too big in proportion to the trunk. In this case less would have been more (better) IMHO
That said, I am not sure if it was unavoidable and you had no choice.
the former owner's gardener had taken an axe to the trunk in a try to kill the stump. fortunately I got to it before he was done. nevertheless, I had to deal with deep gashes on both sides.