Last of the Elms hammered again

[redmoosefaction]

BBC News - Newsnight - The decline of the English elm tree

 

Tree related so I thought I should post

[David Humphries]

Good find & post Red

 

Seddons piece may be worth a watch

 

"Watch Mark Seddon's film in full on Tuesday 24 August 2010 at 2230 BST on BBC Two, then afterwards on the BBC iPlayer and Newsnight website."

 

 

 

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[skyhuck]

Interesting, I have never seen any "sanitation felling" around hear. I think most feel the fight was lost years ago.

 

There is no mention of the size of the trees being affected, if they are young trees they are not affected until they reach a certain size, so you can hedgerow full of youngish Elms that all die together as they reach the required size.

 

There were 100's of mature Elms in Blackpool that have died in the last couple of years, I wondered if the see air had helped keep the beetle at bay for all this time??

 

There are still some large Elms around, but even some tree men seem unable to ID them, many years ago I had an argument with a lad at Fountain's he said that some large Elms in Preston were Rough Barked Limes, we were driving past so I could not get a leaf to prove my point. I have since removed the five largest, due to DED, funny I did not realise Limes got it:001_rolleyes:

 

I also remember the tree climber from Que who was on the TV (meetings with RT) said he had never seen a large living Elm, I visited London for the first time 5 years ago and free climbed a large Elm in one of the parks.

[peter_t]

i have done lots of dutch elm control work and the Council really have ballsed it right up.

 

one bloke i work for who was one of the first contractors for elm work said over the last 5 years they have really let it go. we go out to a job now where we fell and burn 3 trees but have to leave half a dozen other infected trees because we are not allowed to fell them. we used to just fell them and add an extra £20 per tree but now they have to go and inspect and fill out paperwork for each tree so you will be lucky if it gets done 3 weeks later when by that time its too late.

 

EDF are also to blame by not bothering to sheath power lines and preventing us from felling the infected trees.

 

the new rule that says that the land owner has to pay half is a complete joke. it has cost them far more because the land owner doesn't care and doesn't want to pay so it costs 20 more trees for the price of one.

 

also with one land owner who had an elm that had aerial infections. she didn't want to pay for the infected branches to be removed because they would just keep on becoming infected and asked us to fell the tree instead.

this work is supposed to be saving trees not trying to get rid of them!

 

 

 

pete

[Big J]

It's sad that even up here (near Edinburgh) the elms have taken a beating. As far as I am aware, there are now only three large elms on the (Dalmeny) estate. The difficulty is that I don't think the large estates can afford to have a Dutch Elm disease control program. There are 550 acres of woodland on the main estate alone with just a few foresters to take care of that.

 

Jonathan