Progress of kretzschmaria deusta in Big Red

[BigCopper]

Hi All,

I live on Grade 2 listed parkland with a large and ancient copper beech on the lawn outside. Our local council just informed us it has kretzschmaria deusta with a safe life of less than 10 years. The park management company has decided it should be felled immediately, while I feel it might survive for several years if we reduced it's impressive width and height to removed the risk of windthrow. Is there anyway of testing how bad the internal decay has got? Looking at some of the images for fruiting bodies on this site, ours does not seem to have progressed very far yet but I'm just an inquisitive layman

We have got some dead branches higher up but we had put that down to age. As far as I know, no k-deusta was noticed when branches were removed a few years ago. The tree is 17m tall with a crown width of 22m and estimated to be 175 years old. The site has been very damp in the last year and concern has been expressed that this increases the risk of windthrow and/or that the roots are not doing a good job (if that's a thing!?) It stands alone on a lawn and the site is subject to considerable winds at times.

Any advice gratefully received.

 

[AJStrees]

Lovely big tree. You can get a scan done. A Picus test is one of the ways for someone to tell how much internal decay, etc... that there is.

 

It might be possible to fence off the area around the whole tree if you have the space so that no targets can get anywhere near the tree. You would need to get a surveyor to tell you if that is legally possible to do. For example if you were to fence off around the falling distance of the tree around it then possibly you could keep the tree until it fell over, if it is was not going to damage anything.

 

That is only my opinion. You would need to get some professionals involved. If the tree cannot be fenced off and targets kept away from it, then you might not be able to do anything with it.

[BigCopper]

Thanks for that, guess that would be expensive. I assume the amount of fruiting bodies doesn't indicate anything useful.