Mindless tree vandalism

[Jesse]

The tree will be fine, it was just a flash fire, the loss was habitat and the life that live'd in it.

[likeitorlumpit]

Burning the bottom of posts is old country way

Replaced wrongly IMO by dipping in creosote

Replaced probably wrongly by tanalising

Maybe the time for burning has come full circle

[David Humphries]

What was the management plan for this tree in terms of re-establishing the pollard and will the plan now change? That is assuming it is on your patch, but an interesting question anyway. Will the damage from the fire have reduced the energy available to the tree to respond to re pollarding or reduction?

Can you tell us what the physiological consequences of fire damage are likely to be? There is the obvious damage to bark and cambium and breach of barrier zones but is there anything else? Is there a loss of stored energy reserves? I guess there must be??

 

It's not one of our trees, it's in suffolk.

I'm not privy to the management plan for this specific tree, although I have noted that the local friends group/managers of this site, have begun a programme of haloing & new pollard creation.

There doesn't appear to have been a lot of restoration of the pollards (one or two perhaps)

 

As I mentioned at the top of the thread, this tree will probably be OK (its coming into leaf), its really only the heartwood skin of the cavity that has had the bulk of the damage/charring. There will be some areas of vascular damage around where the hollow channels leading up from the central chamber connect to the exit holes higher in the branch canopy (last shot of first post)

 

The real issue here is the total destruction of the micro/macro flora & fauna that was within the heartwood volumes that have been affected.

 

The site seems to be only designated as an LNR but does have an exclusive lichen discovered here & Rackham notes it as "remarkable, even on a world scale"

 

Sadly,a fair few of these 200+ pollards that have been set alight at some point in their existance (mostly within the last 40 years I'd say).

 

Kids eh !

 

 

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[Tom Wilding]

All the kids in my area seem to get thrill from burning trees, the other thing we seem to get is stake trees being snapped..

[openspaceman]

On a similar thread of thought, I have recently been told about the practice of burning wooden posts before installing them in the ground, as a barrier against decay. Interesting idea, has anyone come across this before? I imagine this removes or degrades the compounds in the cell walls that decay fungi feast on.

Anyone got any info. on that?

 

Whilst it's true char is recalcitrant and resists rotting, and that's why it is a good candidate for reverting atmospheric CO2, it is also porous and shrinks tangentially and radially by over 10%, depending on heat and species, this means fresh wood is exposed to microbes via cracks.

[Treecreeper1961]

Whilst it's true char is recalcitrant and resists rotting, and that's why it is a good candidate for reverting atmospheric CO2, it is also porous and shrinks tangentially and radially by over 10%, depending on heat and species, this means fresh wood is exposed to microbes via cracks.

Perhaps not as effective as treating softwood then.

If you are using untreated hardwood (oak or sweetchestnut) then it wood provide protection above the natural resistance of the timber.

[Treecreeper1961]

The tree will be fine, it was just a flash fire, the loss was habitat and the life that live'd in it.

The damage in the second picture looks pretty serious.

[David Humphries]

The damage in the second picture looks pretty serious.

 

The second image in the first post is highlighted below.

 

 

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[fergusonforestry]

had that quite alot round here, had one last year a large beech that was set on fire we had to take down the remains of it wasn't an easy job either due to the extent of the burning

[Rebel_Commando]

Something I came across yesterday that annoyed me quite a bit,not quite the same but deliberate vandalism just the same. A fencing contractor recently put up a stretch of stock fence for our neighbour, just so they could keep the fence in a nice straight line they cut off buttresses from several ash trees. One of them is a lovely specimen with a trunk of 6' DBH