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Copper beech tight fork/union question


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19 hours ago, Dan Maynard said:

OP didn't say he removed it, but that it has been removed.

 

Slater's the bloke, yes. I'm still not completely on board, I look at the ash trees round here with tight unions and I don't see any natural braces at all. Maybe the theory works better in beech but we don't have much of that.

 

Slater's prone to bold statements. Having been to one of his talks,  I believe he's a bit of a dramatist. But I don't think he's saying that all compression forks are a result of natural bracing, he's saying all included bark is. I happen not to agree. Any situationthat results in a compression fork not flexing normally and thus allowing the bark cambium to generate bark within a compression over one or more years could create included bark. The deadwweight of overextended leaning substems can do this. I've even seen rocks jammed in forks by kids doing it. Articicial bracing could do it. And i think it may vary from speies to species, because the force exerted by the annual increment of woody tissue within a compression area may or may be not be great enough to crush the cambium and this may depend on porosity and other species-specific characteristics.

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5 hours ago, Twentyeight Trees said:

I haven’t done any maintenance to this tree yet. If you look at the natural brace in the photos you’ll see it was removed years ago, the clean edge to it looks like it was pruned out rather than naturally removed. 
 

Don’t panic I’m not a remover of natural braces, I was just curious to hear other peoples opinions on them.

I confess, I'm a natural brace remover unless the crossing is fused or unless the tree is in a risk-free environment. It rarely ends well otherwise.

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13 minutes ago, daltontrees said:

I confess, I'm a natural brace remover unless the crossing is fused or unless the tree is in a risk-free environment. It rarely ends well otherwise.

How so? 
Not looking for an argument, honest.

Just curious.

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Because it rarely ends well. One branch gets rubbed and weakened to the point of failure, and in the meantime (as Slater reasons) the fork below gets weaker and weaker with included bark and when the brace fails so does the fork.

Plus I just like to see stuff radiating outwards from the centre. For highly visible trees that sort of aesthetic can be important.

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