daltontrees

I thought that too but it has alternate leaves and the mystery one has opposite leaves.

Try Osmanthus decorus.

It looks mighty familiar, it might come to me over breakfast.

I'd second that, although I know it by its synonym Ganoderma adspersum.

I think their suitability for situations is a bit misunderstood. In nature when they are growing close together they shoot up in competition for light and couldn't stand up on tehir pwn at that height without companion shelter. When more open grown they take their time a bit more and the height to diameter ratio can be much lower. Lower branches live longer and spread further and the tree stays more squat. Still a big'un but tolerable in urban environments.

There's no right answer. I was working last week with a brand new Juno and an oldis Geo on the same survey. The Juno was preciser but inaccurate, the Geo wqas imprecise but accurate. When you're in amongst trees and buildings it is just not possible for a device to interpret compromised satellite signals and produce an accurate and precise position. It's like trying to find out where someone is shouting from in a canyon.

Serious question... why?

I am led to believe PT Mapper is a magic wand. It and PGIS is £1250.

Mr Humphries! Have you gone over to the dark side? Cut it down?

I think so, I surveyed one on Monday and that feature helped, it is really quite distinctive. That and the long long needles.

Looks like he's been using a 1:1 petrol:oil mix too. Classy.

Oh the pain, I have been opening the .tsp scheme files in Notepad, manually adding, amending and deleting and moving around lines of code and then reconverting to .tsp and adding to PGIS. I am currently just about there with the perfect .tsp which groups data logically for different types of survey so that it can be used for any survey because you can just skip whole pages in the field with a touch of the stylus. Means I can import and process any survey into my standard spreadsheet without amending it too. Sure, I have to hide some unused fields for reporting, but these are set as standard 'hides' too. Did you find any tricks for manually adjusting .tsps? I have a feeling there's no shortcut.

Yeah, lucky you! I often have to spend whole days surveying in constant rain, puddles of water colecting on teh screen and having to be wiped off every 30 seconds. Also I have done days on end in sub-zero temperatures when a swipe-screen device is pretty hopeless because if you took your gloves off to use them you would literally have frostbite by mid morning. There's definitely not just one right solution, but in the west of scotland I assume the worst and have chosen kit accordingly. The Touch £G seems unbelievably cheap, I think it is now discontinued but can still be bought. Does it import GPS co-ordinates into a spreadsheet automatically?

Second hand Geo XT, new Pocket GIS license nd various bits and bobs plus an oldish laptop as I had to have Active Sync and Windows Mobile and prefer the old Excel. Am also using free trial period dwg/dxf converters as I don't need them often enogh to justify buying a CAD license. And none of tis produces plotting of RPAs or crown spreads or CEZs. I nwold accept that if you have the technical expertise and time and determination you could crack some of this a lot cheaper but if you were to put your normal charge-out rate against the time you are likely to spend on it you might like me wish you had just bought PT Mapper/GIS and a new Juno bnecause it would have been cheaper in the end. From recent experience using a Juno and Geo on the same survey job, the Juno is quicker and if that can improve your productivity on site by even 5% a day it will soon pay dividends. Tablets aint waterproof (even with Gumboy covers) and the batteries don't last (and I mean after a few months of cold weather their life shortens dramatically) and they will get damaged and they are just about useless in the cold when gloves are needed. A stylus solution is the only one. And not one of these pantsy capacitative ones, miy lat one lasted less than a day outdoors. I use a Dell Axim pda for collecting data with a spreadsheet for sites that have already been mapped by me on the Geo, it is easy to merge spreadsheets afterwards. But they are hopeless in the wet and using them through a waterproof cover is torture for me. It is the use of something in the cold and rain day after day that means the only solution for me is based around an indestructible stylus-based long battery life completely waterproof mapper e.g Trimble/Thales. Using Pocket GIS can be teeth-splittingly frustrating at first, try reading the operating manuals (there are two) and you will soon lose the will to live. Try as I have (I've almost cracked it) editing and creating your own translation scheme and you will be punching the walls. Tey are based on an old file format that operates on a zero tolerance of mistakes basis in the programming. But because it can be set up with drop-down pick-lists (these are grenerally freely avalable, pm me and I can tell you where to get one legitimately or you can have one of mine) it can vastly speed up data collection and you might soon find that 99% of the time a big screen is not needed. Besides, try shoving a big screen in your pocket. I'd be interested to hear if you go for a DIY solution and if you achieve it and at what cost.

Meant to say, I have just put a set-up together on a shoestring budget, cost me £1.5k. That's with legit software licenses and kit that can withstand 6 hours in the rain (yesterday) and being dropped 4m onto rocks (today). You get what you pay for. If you magage ot for a few hundred, patent it and don't tell anyone how you did it.

A few hundred quid? You're having a laugh!

Sorry, I thought you were gong to look at Sinclair or Greig. I've already stated all that S,E & M said about it.

No idea! Maybe you could send a message to Barchams and ask them to clarify. All the suggestions are that the definitions are from 3936 1992 but if you've looked at it and drawn a blank I can't think of anything else.

I'd be keen to hear what you find out. I have defiunitely seen examples of K.d whole-tree failures that had no outwrd signs of infection and no above-surface sapwood entry point anywere near th failure zone. It has always suggested dead taproot entry. Armillaria as an actively pathogenic infecter seems consistent with its mode of cambium killing, but it is a much bigger step in my mind for a heartwood rotter like K.d to cross the cambium on the way in.

Found it! "Fungal Strategies ..." Schwartze Engels and Mattheck p84 says '... Greig's study (1989) on a horse chestnut avenue indicates that Ustulina [sic] deusta may also spread from affected trees to healthy trees via root contacts. Moreover there are indications that the fungus can spread in the soil in mycelial formand infect neighboring trees (sinclair et al 1987).' I suspect that I have both the referred publications, but that's enough for one evening's research. what think you or anyone about the possibility of active pathogenicity in K.d?

OK, I,ll try and track it down over the next couple of days. I came across a good case today, k.d up at 3m on an old substem breakage on a Norway Maple (1200mm diameter), rarely seen it so high up but the rotted stub was caked wit telemorphs. I couldn't believe it was compartmentalised to just one side of the tree in saprophytic mode, so I took an increment bore on the adjacent stem, and there it was about 2 inches in. Alas the whole tree may have to go.

I recall reading somewhere (either Mattheck or Lonsdale) that there is some evidence that K. deusta may be actively pathogenic. Have you come across this? It might also need nothing other than a dead tap root site to gain entry and, being capable of working in anaerobic or near anaerobic conditions, it can be hollowing out a butt with no outward sign of infection and very litte evidence of canopy decline until the last few years.

I love the Botanics, could easily spend a week there. But if you really want to do it properly, you could spenda week doing the entire Botanics. Some of the sites are more suitable than others for some tree types, for example Benmore for conifers. So you could start in Edinburgh, go to Dawyck, then Logan, then Benmore then back to Edinburgh. It's the sort of saddo self-indulgent holiday I would do if I didn't have a family who sigh every time I wander off to look at a tree in a park.

Every day's a school day, and I dread the day that isn't. Can you imagine going to bed without having realised, learnt or worked something out that day? I was up at 5am! Learning to play Jerusalem Ridge on the mandolin, but that kind of counts as studying. Anyway, when I moved from surveying to trees and had to study formally again it was hard, very hard. I don't think I could go through what you're doing. Not at my age.... If I go to see Herr Mattheck it will be for entertainment value, won't take a single note.

If you ever have to work in one, you'll never forget it. Standard quick check for me between Norway ad Sitka Spruce is to cup the end of a branch in the hand and start to squeeze slowly. If it's not unbearable, it's not Sitka. Norway can be a bit sore but it's a poofter compared to Sitka.