daltontrees

So far, you win!

Score depends on how much it cost...how much?

It looks spindle bush related. I am due over on the south side of Glasgow next week andI will see if I can track down the one I saw there once and knock the person's door.

Been there, but they're single seeded.

I ahve a client witha very late Walnut in Edinburgh.Looks really worrying but I bet it's burst forth since I saw it a few weeks ago. Dense lichen may be a bi-product of late leafing, giving the lichen (wich is pretty slow growing) an extra month or two of photosynthesising before it is shaded out. I can imagine that in extreme cases it could hamper the development of dormant buds in the inner crown if branch tips were lost to storm damage or general environmental die-back factors.

How about this? Mushrooms You Can Only Really Relish Having In Zone Around Lignin

'Gross errors' and 'misled the court' in on sentence? You must be pretty sure of that or esle you've got a libel case on your hands and might have a starring role in negligence and perjury cases. Can you not just stick to your own points instead of having digs at other people?

That's really ingenious. Bet the H&S bods would have a problem over possible accidental release not while it's loaded but while it is momentarily slack in a position where fall potential would suddenly increase by the length of all the rope used in the knot. Anything over 500mm is I think a no-no. A possible refinement would be to put a few twists in the final bight that is passed up through, because otherwise on bigger stems or with irregular bark one loop of the bight might not be pressed as firmly as the other and could drop out. If it is the working end loop, it will be constantly being tugged and the loop could inch its way out. It does this anyway, I have managed to get this not to collapse after repeated twitching. I can try and show this refinement in a pic of you want. I have also tried a little variation that allows you to recover the rope by plling on the static end rather than the working end. Only tested so far on a kitchen chair, but it does seem to work. Easier to show than to explain. Again pic could be provided. Great idea, by the way. I can see its possibility in DRT too, where recoverable redirects are a pain in the bum. Quite straigthforward now that think about it as long as, like in SRT, a suitable form of fork is available.

Degenerated? It's all just good-natured chat. On a forum where half the posts are about what people are watching on the telly or having for their dinner, it is relatively speaking refreshing to discuss tree issues with fellow tree-ists, however regressive the chat seems. Good point about what the A in CAS stands for, by the way. Although |I don't think I'll ever get comfortable with Arborist being used the american way.

My guess would be Boletus sp. If so, not a worry and possibly good as a sign of mycorhyzal (dammit I cna never spell that word) activity.

Well put. The difficulty I think lies in the absence of motivation to work on anything that doesn't have a commercial return. I felt this acutely after putting in about 8 hours reviewing and commenting on the draft Bats BS. Why bother? Well I suppose I have to answer that. I did it because the draft was unworkable as a Standard, and someone had to speak up or else no-one would use it. And bats would suffer. Nature needs all the help it can get against clumsy, greedy, ignorant people. But I'll get zero other tangible reward. I'll have to pay to buy the resultant BS. QTRA and TRAQ are both commercially viable from what I can tell. Being a menber of CAS certainly is. I don't see the level of business being there to make Helliwell viable, CAVAT operates in a non-commercial environment. CTLA and the iTree suite have legs. Just. I'd agree therefore with the correlation between use and back-up but also viability. I plan to practice and a member of CAS without using either TRAQ or QTRA. Time will tell whether CAS hitching its wagon to TRAQ comes to reflect badly on it and therefore on its members.

As gerbutt has said, big ones are pretty much in line. So there's no upper limit of size, as the diameter increases the step distance decreases until it's zero. It's very hard to flat fall big branches anyway, and rarely a luxury that's available. I love those occasional days when I get to free fall everything off a big tree. That's when you get to experiment.

Book has arrived, and it is indeed fabulous. Apart from the scientific names being out of date, it is really easy to follow. It is rare to get a book set out in this clarity and structure. Must be a dying art. There's also a nice clear method for making thin sections of wood (for microscope) that will show up the cell walls red and the fungal hyphae blue. Just need to find out where to get some aqueous picric acid!? Thanks for the tip, I would never have thoght to buy this book based on its title alone.

Yes thanks. The CAS certainly isn't the arbiter of which system is better, but it's reason for preferring TRAQ to QTRA is some sort of endorsement of how imprecise the courts allow systems to be. Any truly unfit-for-purpose method of assessing and managing risk woud I expect be discovered by the courts. Judges are under quite a bit opf pressure (as one sees from written appeal decisions) to scrutinise methods and expertise.

A flat fall can be more or less assured by using an outboard step cut, sounds like what the guy was doing.

Fascinating! An alternative is to check a meter on kiln dried wood in nearest buildier's merchants. I used to check mine on any bit iof exposed wood in a centrally heated room. Not a perfect 'absolute' value, but a good relative one.

Since you ask. The E/W Act says that a Notice cannot specify that a hedge be reduced to below 2 metres. The guidance says that if you cut a hedge to any height over 2m and that this will kill the hedge, this is to be taken as the equivalent of reducing it to below 2m. In effect, if the action hedge height will kill the hedge, a higher survivable height must be specified instead even if the adverse effect of the hedge will remain excessive. Reporters (oops, Inspectors) seem to have taken that line consistently. In Scotland there is no such wording in the Act, and decisions are coming out that are saying 'it might kill the hedge, but so be it'. That would be the correct decision under our Act. The owner can then put up a fence of 2 metres instead, which doesn't require planning permission.

I'd go with Acer negundo

I can't state definitively whether you are right or wrong on this. But I can say that I personally disagree very strongly that it's 'no real biggie'. Judges don't give a damn about acronyms, points, systems, but they are there specifically to adjudicate on duties of care and reasonable behaviour between members of society. They are there to imagine what the ordinary man should or shouldn't have done. and that includes whether a professional with a duty of care to a tree-owning client has covered his client's arse or his own. Preferably with something more convincing than a few microns of latex...

Thanks, I hadn't been able to see that when I looeked last week. For the picky, it came into effect the day after it was made therefore 12th March. And then communicated largely by telepathy.

The sort of fun I could do without. I had just taken the laterst Legislation website version and made the latest regulations changes to it. How the heck is anyone meant to know what the rules are? Doesn't it make a mockery of the basic concept of rle of law?

I am currently a danger to other road users, as I am so busy looking around for specimens of this wherever I go that a nasty accident is bound to ensue soon.

I have just wasted a good hour or more trying to figure this out and I give up! I have looked at soooo many species. I saw this plant once before on the south side of Glasgow. And I failed to identify it then, after going through every book I had. I do wish someone would get it.

Right enough. I was just going by the seed pods. I really should have looked at the leaves too. I will have another think...

Koelreuteria paniculata.