daltontrees

I'd very much agree with this, a 30% foliar reduction will just accelerate demise wihthout taking away anything heavy that is the real danger. An uncalibrate tomograph, doesn't mean much, but the print suggests the tree is goosed with Ganoderma and who knows what else inside. And cracks. AS ever, the quiestion is mostly about risk and liability. Yes, complete risk aversion and aesthetics would have the whole tree away, to the ground, now. But an assessment of risk might say (on the cemetery side) Likely failure - large limb target presence in weather consditions likely to cause failures - almost nil severity of harm - serious permanent injury or death likelihood of failure - high Overall risk - tolerable Overriding reasons for not reducing risk to as low as reasonably practicable? Not many So you're heading there for not a 30% foliar reduction but a 30% lib reduction all over, particularly cemetery side. And once you get that far into a Beech canopy, regeneration is slow or unlikely, so you need to save every inner growth point. A heavy dismantle and careful avoidance of collateral damage to small growth will make it a big and difficult job. Is there a building going up behind the tree and could the tree or any oart of it hit the building? If so the risk on that side is possibly - Likely failure - whole tree target presence in weather conditions likely to cause failures - 100% (permanent building presence) severity of harm - £100,000 (worst case, structural damage) likelihood of failure - moderate to high Overall risk - high Overriding reasons for not reducing risk to as low as reasonably practicable? No excuse. Action required is whatever is enough to reduce the risk of basal failure to low. Again a heavy reduction, foliar and limbs. Based on all that, and if there is some desire to preserve the tree and manage it down over a couple of decades, I wouldn't be thinking BS3998 reduction I'd be thinking structural reduction. At least 30% by limb length. An then regular risk re-assessment. Annual probably.

Just to be definitive, Scots Pine is Pinus sylvestris.

I like that philosophy and the look a lot. I have a cheesy Marlin acoustic, I go straight to it past the more expensive giutars when I just want sound. Chances are my eyes will be shut while playing, unltimately it's the sound that counts. But there's the odd one you wouldn't throw out of bed for eating crackers...

Totally! If your shi*t's going to hit the media fan, it has got to be for something badass like this!

You probably made your point. I expect she checks all her stuff going out now, and probably flusghed bright red every time she remembers wha you wrote. You did her, and every subsequent applicant, a favour.

Well, if we're showing bass guitars, here's my new Morgan Monroe F style MM5 Rocky Top mandolin. Not very rock and roll but gorgeous anyway.

It's supposedly to do with the selection of materials and quality control standards. Slightly curved grain in neck wood, and commonly (I am told and have observed) chrome coming off after a decade, pickup windings bridging, cheapo knobs falling off. If you keep your guitar in a case in a centrally heated house and aren't gigging it and playing it hard, a mexican one should last a lifetime. Otherwise you might very slightly regret it after about 10 years. I also think the problems Feder hadwith teh mexican stuff may have been mostly sorted by now. I wouldn't take a 15 year olf mexican tele even if it looked mint. I have amexican strat that's doing just fine after 10.

It'sa benchmark of industry best practice against which hteh specification and execution of tree works can be measured. It says it shouldn't be used as a specification. But if you specify that work must be dne in accordance with industry best practice then you are basically using the BS not as a spec but as a judge if it's ever needed. It's a Standard, as in 'high standard' but there's nothing standard in it. More about approach than giving the right answer for everything. That;'s the way I see it anyway. Many COuncil's do manage to turn it from BS to that other kind of 'BS' through lack of ... well just lack of various things. Might be managerial support, might be time, might be brain cells, might be experience. For whatever reason it's unforgiveable. If I did my job as badly as whoever dealt with these conditions I'd be mortified and wouldn't expect to get paid.

It won't make any differnence to anything if you do, unless they are reading this website and think that the disclosure of their actions will be prejudicial to them in some way. That's a 'probably don't bother' in my mind.

Shocking stats! Typo could just as well read 'reduce'. Thing is, we don't know...

This is just awful practice by the Council. Their conditions are unenforceable. That doesn't mean that you can do just whathever you want, though. A few selected points come to mind. 1. Your client or customer does nt have permission for a 30% thin, or any thin. 2. A 25% crown lift is, as others have said, meaningless.except you could argue that 25% of the crow could be removed from the bottom up. But I suspect that that is not what the Council meant. I suspect it meant to modify the 30% reduction of the application to 25%. 3. The condition about the identitiy of the contractor is nonsensical and probaby void. 4. The condition about compliance with BS3998 personally I think is enforceable desite KJMBE and btggaz bugbears and the like, since the Standard is industry best practice, and that's someting that a court could scrutinise. and most of all - 5. TPO controls and enforcement action are against the person who caused permitted unconsented tree work to be done. If you are following orders and doing specified work, go ahead. But if you are being asked to interpret the conditions and carry out appropriate but unspecified works, you could end up being the subject of prosecution. The case might fall through, but that's not quite the point. As soon as tyou takr onan advisory ir interpretative role you are openign a can of worms. If you don't know wher this leaves you, don't go there. At least get a clear record of the customer telling you to follow a direct order. Get the customer, in other words, to figure out what is meant by a 25% crown lift. You won't get anyone in the industry telling you with any confidence what it means.

Soneme would say that horses that have to resort to eating sycamore seeds are possibly being malnourished by poor pasturage. Hows about doingthe tres and the horses a favour and re-assess the adequacy of their grazings?

When 'past it' Laetiporous is said to crumble like hard cheese. Willow seems to be a typical host.

It's higher up than I've ever seen Meripilus. It might instead be the outward sign of a hearwood rotter, consistent with your tomograph result. Laetiporpus sulphureus comes to mind, as by this time of the year the fruiting bodies are looking a little ravaged. Not unheard of on Beech, I've seen one or two examples up here.

That'd not fair, I had already decided that trying to identify poplars was life sapping and unsatisfying, and here you are showing that it is possible and (very marginally) rewarding. Curse you! Thank you!

How many you after?

http://arbtalk.co.uk/forum/tree-identification-pictures/29066-help-strange-tree-id-poplar.html

Do it! Or tell me where it is and I'll do it. The best thing would be to try and record as much info about the tree as possible before you touch it, particularly crown volume. I can give you some pinters on how to do this if you want. But once you are taking the tree down it is essential to keep the sections properly referenced. I did this with a smallish hornbeam a couple of years ago and what turned out to be useful was this. As you disc down, every time you complete a horizontal cut put a simple orienteering compass on the cut face and mark (with permanent marker) the direction of north. Repeat until tree is gone. Ideally each disc should be referenced with tree height, but a sequential numbering suffices because it's easier to work out the height of the cut face afterwards by adding all the discs plus all the kerf widths on the ground. Rather than sequential numbering, up a tree I would write the time of cut on the disc. As a minumum I was also taking a high quality digital photo of each disc section. If you do this from a tripod with a fixed distance between lens and face, it is possible to measure growth rings from the photos. Easier and quicker than it sounds. Ideally pin a ruler to the face for absolute scale. Personally I am not sure it would be worth doing more than a coupe of thin sectons. Macroscopic sections might be most useful. I have been casually trying this this week with a fairly small piece of wood. Basically with a cut piece, preferably a radial section with a fairly flat face (a new hardpoint joinery saw works well), you get a big sheet of sandpaper on a table and you rub the face on it in a circular motion, then repeat with finer and finer sandpaper and in no time you will have a nicely polished face that can be examined with the naked eye or a hand lens/magnifying glass or USB microscope. Staining will show up the growth rings and any other differential growth rates that might be a result of microscopic buckling. And I bet we're all wrong about this tree, it will end up being something none of us thought of.

That was a hard read. Seems to have lost something in the translation from German. But as a piece of science it's badly flawed, so much so that by half way through I had given up on its credibility. A few good points though but just food for thought rather than proof of anything. Looks like an elaborate sales pitch for Elastometers. So the SIA inexpensively gives the required wall thickness in 5 minutes. After climbing the tree, attaching wireless inclinometer sensors and a winch cable and then loading the winch. That might not be so quick. Or inexpensive. And will probably reliably estimate just how much force would be required to winch the tree over or snap it. For me the t/R rait has about one useful purpose - if it is above 0.3 I am not going to be looking for much more evidence that failure is foreseeable. Trying to relate t/R to probability of failure above the 'foreseeable' threshold is just pointless.

Ta Paul and Kevin. So SERPR is not going to pass into common usage in the industry any time soon. The context of my initial look at it was Meripilus, and all bets are off there since detect healthy looking roots right across the SERPR and then find out the next day when teh whole tree blows over and the root plate is sticking its bum in the air that said healthy looking roots are hollow on the underside. Anyway, I will hang up the anorak on this subject (unless anyone wants to go on). It is interesting just to note that for the 60cm radius the SERPR of 360cm is 6 times the stem radius. This size of tree is close to the 1.25m diameter maximum for RPA calculations, where the RPA radius would be 1500cm, which is 25 times the radius. 4 times the SERPR. There we go, 4 times the radius needed for support is needed for nutrition.

Yep, there are few things in life as futile as trying to identify Poplars.

I am leaning towards P. canescens. But it is a hybrid between alba and tremula and all sorts of variations seem to crop up.

I think the Birch is Betula pubescens. papyrifera has warty shoots, yours look largely wart-free and slightly downy. Your catkins are far too short for papyrifera. I can't explain the black glands, I have never noticed or not noticed (!) them on pubescens before and I don't know if they are unique to papyrifera.

Spot on, I went straight to 'Body Language...", opened the book randomly at page 188 and there it was. Not a formula or a calculation but reference to a plotted curve whereby the stem radius can be related to the rootplate radius e.g. 10cm = 130cm, 20cm = 230cm, 40cm = 300cm, 60cm = 360cm. Anyone actually use this?