Tony Croft aka hamadryad

I make a decision in my mind whether i can work the spec into a sensible and reasonable compromise to the trees and clients best interests and if i think its not remotely workable I pipe up or if i can and i often can I work with it and its rarely disappointing to anyone involved. you cant treat two trees the same its just not cricket

we operate on \standard known as BS 3998 in it you will find % has been superseded by a more accurate technical description,removing the confusions where % was fraught with miss-translations. Thats the theory anyway,reality is VERY different!

BBC - Podcasts - Farming Today

I just tweeted the page link mate, well worth wider eyes having this one in their scopes for thoughts.

This is very good news, and i sincerely hope all goes well guys, sounds like the right attitude, sustainable is a word that gets abused, keep it real guys:thumbup1:

Nice crepidotus sp david and a prize image of Podo, awesome shot, made me green!

17th is BMS!

Spiffing good post Mark, top draw!

will do

whatever happens, get loads of photos and document it, and come back later with the news:thumbup1:

I think Davids hunch is spot on, this is what is commonly reffered to as Eiffel tower syndrome or body language, and very very typical of Inonotus dryadeus. and I can only re iterate Davids comments:thumbup1:

well thats not what the ICF chief said, they are ignoring the research of the swedes and going ahead with advising a scorched earth policy on Chalara, this is as weall seem to be in agreement on, totaly unacceptable. learn to credit where its due and I might give you the benifit of the doubt! I dont get into those conversations anymore, its so pre 2010! and so a wast of time,the sooner we stop talking % the better:thumbup:

average 12 rings to the inch 3.2mtrs circumference equal to 102 cm DBH or around 380 years old give or take! Im trying to document all I can of the ash now before chalara takes hold stupid question! sounds a bit overkill a small gransfors forest axe would be more my style! Nice one Danavan:thumbup1:

absolutely, and we need to think in ecological time frames, not in the here and now. they want to burn the potentially resistant ones too, They said the containment is priority and outweighs the risk of losing resistant cohorts! Im going nuts......this is insane

ash die back Chalara fraxinea- and why we must not condone the eradication policy, it is here now, lets give nature a chance to find a way. Trees that thrive amid killer fungus hold secret to saving threatened ash - Telegraph

carefull what you wish for silky! global warming doesnt just mean extreme dry or heat, it also means extreme cold and I mean arctic! I can remember climbing trees as a teenager in freezing temps, im too long in the tooth to be going through all that again!

great, lets hope my new job is offered asap! then I can stay by the puter all winter!

agreed, but a very very rare situation indeed. I dont know if I updated it yet but what i thought was Meripilus at height turned out to be Polyporus durus, so shall not assume too much at height in future, got to get up there every time to be sure.

Proper pollards!

best laid plans of mice and men, 2011 come and gone, as did 2012, best pull my finger out and get a quote for insurance!

Thanks Silky, and thats kinda why I do it!

Force cone method (Mattheck) You will find much of interest and of use here Baumdiagnoseseminare mit Prof. Dr. Claus Mattheck http://bibliothek.fzk.de/zb/berichte/Mattheck-Poster-100907.pdf http://bibliothek.fzk.de/zb/berichte/Mattheck-Poster-110503.pdf http://bibliothek.fzk.de/zb/berichte/Mattheck-Poster-110610.pdf

(Copied here too as highly relevant) A dificult fungi to asses with any level of certainty, the airspade is about the only way of getting a true handle on progress. Matthecks cone method should help giving ideas as to where roots NEED to be. Though root morphology is not as cut and dry as this, most trees once mature will have a cone of decay in the basal region and associated levels of decay in the attached old woody roots. meripilus is one of those that can feed from these older tissues for many decades before progressing to the more dangerous mode of degrading the shear killing fine root system. It is really this action of dissolving shear killing roots that is the danger with Meripilus colonisation. if we have shear kill roots we have no problem, if we dont, we have a big problem. So IMO it is these shear killing roots we should attempt to locate, and most basal investigations I've seen done have been at the very stem base, where very little worthwhile knowledge on the mechanics can be gained as to the true extent of this particular interaction. The other flip side of the coin is the potential for loosening of the shear root ball during such investigations, retaining trees with Meripilus is what I would regard as the most tricky of all the fungi interactions, a very challenging area. One needs a VERY solid understanding of mechanics, decay modes and aging tree morphology to fully understand and give a worthy prognosis to each case. All the evaluation tools picus, resist-o-graph, root radar have little to offer in these investigations, and may as well be left in their box! root radar will pick up the sound upper half of the horseshoe form of the roots but not the shear killers, resist-o-graph will go through the upper wall of the root and then feel no resistance as it is the underside that is gone, this isnt the problem, and it doesn't tell you anything about the re iterative roots coming off as shear kills from the occluding tissues associated with the decaying undersides. and Picus, well that is a butt evaluation tool and we all know butt rot is too low to be read with Picus in Meripilus cases dont we.

A dificult fungi to asses with any level of certainty, the airspade is about the only way of getting a true handle on progress. Matthecks cone method should help giving ideas as to where roots NEED to be. Though root morphology is not as cut and dry as this, most trees once mature will have a cone of decay in the basal region and associated levels of decay in the attached old woody roots. meripilus is one of those that can feed from these older tissues for many decades before progressing to the more dangerous mode of degrading the shear killing fine root system. It is really this action of dissolving shear killing roots that is the danger with Meripilus colonisation. if we have shear kill roots we have no problem, if we dont, we have a big problem. So IMO it is these shear killing roots we should attempt to locate, and most basal investigations I've seen done have been at the very stem base, where very little worthwhile knowledge on the mechanics can be gained as to the true extent of this particular interaction. The other flip side of the coin is the potential for loosening of the shear root ball during such investigations, retaining trees with Meripilus is what I would regard as the most tricky of all the fungi interactions, a very challenging area. One needs a VERY solid understanding of mechanics, decay modes and aging tree morphology to fully understand and give a worthy prognosis to each case. All the evaluation tools picus, resist-o-graph, root radar have little to offer in these investigations, and may as well be left in their box! root radar will pick up the sound upper half of the horseshoe form of the roots but not the shear killers, resist-o-graph will go through the upper wall of the root and then feel no resistance as it is the underside that is gone, this isnt the problem, and it doesn't tell you anything about the re iterative roots coming off as shear kills from the occluding tissues associated with the decaying undersides. and Picus, well that is a butt evaluation tool and we all know butt rot is too low to be read with Picus in Meripilus cases dont we.

and your coriolus versicolour is in fact Bjerkandera adusta the smokey bracket:biggrin: