daltontrees

A most enjoyable read. Do you know what happen if a fasciated twig is allowed to keep growing for a few years?

It might be the appropriate reaction, and might even be intra vires but if you had applied for a high hedge notice, wouldn't you be livid that the Council seemed to be abusing its position?.

A quick and hypothetical question for anyone out there who is with it on High Hedges. What would happen if a Council got an application for the reduction of a high hedge and then realised that the hedge comprised trees of significant amenity value, and to protect them against reduction it wanted to TPO them?

Gilman (2003) is very nice too. Sensibly he did not try to debunk Shigo based on only small trees of one species. I wonder if he was ever taken up on his recommendation of multi-species larger tree research? I spotted a typo in the Bibliography - Shigo 1985 : How tree branches are attacked...

Neely (1991) is a fabulous piece of work. I had no idea that this research had been done. This is what I mean about good methodology. I may read it again just to admire the quality of the approach regardless of the results.

Well, I was going to go out and do some work but it looks like that's my morning spoken for now. Thanks for the documents. Generally, no-one whose research methodologies are rigorous and whose approach is scientific should be bothered by criticism. It's the lifeblood of the advancement of collective understanding. If pseudoscience or nonsense methodologies or unsubstantiated assumptions or personal agendas stand in the way of that, it really annoys me, and so it should. I, you and everyone else are peers, we are reviewing albeit fairly informally. I'm not even thinking about Slater in particular. Just making a general point that echoes yours.

"the environment secretary had long made it clear that his priority was growing the economy as well as improving the natural environment". Now there's two priorities that are mutually exclusive. Mercifully we should be able to vote these people out before they get to do any real damage.

What an intriguing picture! Was it a Pine, and if so do you know which species? And what height would that slice have been at when the tree was growing?

The OP's second picture (of the bark) had flaky and smooth, a bit inconclusive and no scale to suggest how old the stem was. I don't know about menziesii hardiness either. A. unedo is a bit of a curiosity, definitely naturalised in UK and Ireland and does well apparently on the south western tip of Ireland. Dunno if menziesii would stand it. It's possibly the maritime influence and salt in the air that saves it from serious frost damage.

Wait, who are we saying is god, Mattheck or Shigo? And much as I am prepared to accept polytheism, I can't see Slater being much more than an altar boy so far. PS, any chance of getting a shot on that Gilman article after you've read it please?

Could equally be Arbutus menziesii, but it's much rarer.

Indeed, anything that makes me think hard is good. And what you refer to about Slater's fame is what I meant by gaining advantage. It's all very well getting better known, but I would rather be known for being constructive.

I think that's what I meant. That is to say, it would be appropriate to wait for the Council to direct you to replant rather than automatically replanting. That way they get to choose size, position and species.

No, it was just generalised cynicism. Forget it, I am just a bit of a grump sometimes and the Slater article always came across to me as not particularly constructive.

Regulation 14(2)(b). 5 days notice required by law. Unless it's dangerous , in which case notify them as soon as you can but get on with the removal. Replanting is not mandatory, it's up to the Council to specify it.

My cynical view is that we should be surprised not by what is in Pandora's Box but by how much truth is wilfully concealed by those who stand to gain advantage by the concealment.

I meant that YOU would have solved the riddle by Easter. Go for it, that's what I say. If you have an inquiring mid that imagines the way trees work at a cellular level, seeing them at a cellular level with the use of a microscope takes you right into that world. You don't need to be Alice in Wonderland to appreciate how liberating it can be to take a stroll amongst the xylem.

Rather beautifully put! In strictly Darwinian terms, we need not analyse CODIT too much. Trees get damaged but they survive because they have evolved mechanisms to cope with damage. Our species has evolved, on the other hand, to include the ability to overlook evidence in favour of... well I'm not yet sure. Disdain for other species seems quite high on the agenda, as does a curious mixture of intelligence and selective ignorance. As I am more than sure you know, we are part of nature and not some sort of self-appointed overseer of it.

It was just a guess. A bit too clustered to be D.c and blurry enough to be anything. What's your guess?

I rarely see D.q. The brackets are not flat at all, flat on top and bulging beneath so that you can see the maze gills from afar. I only know of it on Oak and I have only ever seen D.c on Willow and Alder.

It was such a nice specimen and I had my wife's new Nikon with me. Similar pattern on Daedalea quercina. Another easy name to remember if you know your Icarus and Daedalus fable and that Oak is Quercus.

I have the very thing here. I can't remember what it is, a thin section of a cross section of a broadleaf tree. Individual cells can clearly be seen. The magnification is 600x, so much so that even though the thin section is only about 1/200th of a millimetre I was unable to focus on the front and the back of the thin section at the same time. It looks blurry because you are seeing one side of the slide out of focus and the other in focus. The first picture is in Plane Polarised Light. The S1, S2 and S3 layers of the cell walls are visible. The second slide shows it in Cross Polarised Light. Sure enough, where there is nothing to rotate the light it looks black. But the cellulose in the cell walls, especially the shallow angled cellulose in S2, is diffracting the light so that it is getting through the second polariser. And if it had been infected with say K. deusta in soft rot mode, you would have been able to see a reduction in cellulose. Which is what I am trying to put across as the great benefits of microscopy with the advantage of Cross Polarised Light and a rotating stage. To be honest I don't see how anyone could get by without one!

OK I have found something suitable. A thin section of a piece of mica-rich granite, I think. In the middle is a crystal of Biotite, a mica. In a rock this looks jet black in reflected light. In thin section it is transparent and slightly yellow/green/brown. The picture is in Plane Polarised Light. The second picture is in Cross Polarised Light. No light should be getting through, but it is because every crystal is rotating the light. The biotite is no brightly coloured. The textureless grey stuff is quartz, all shades of grey depending on optic axis (never mind that bit). OK now I need to find pics of a tree section in Cross Polarised Light.

Another quick tutorial for anyone that's interested. This is a bit hardcore but is useful foundation understanding for anyone that wants to get into microscopy. So far I have referred to the two types of microscope being reflected and transmitted light. I am going to concentrate on transmitted light for now. That's basically looking at light passing through thin sections. But whadya know there is more than one kind of light. Every bit of light we receive is made up of zillions of photons, little bundles of light energy. Each one has a random orientation or plane. So say you were looking at a conventional wrist watch. One photon could be arriving in your eye in the 12 o'clock 6 o'clock plane. Another in the 2 o'clock 8 o'clock plane. Yet another in the 11.30 5.30 plane etc etc a million times over in absolutely every possible plane. The eye can't tell which plane each photon is in, it doesn't matter, it's all just light. But white light is made up of all the colours at once. Proof of this is that it can be split by a prism. Dig out a copy of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, that's what's on the cover. When you look at white light through a microscope this is what you get. All colours and all orientations. This is called 'Bright Field'. There are times, though, when you might only want to get one colour of light. For this, microscopes can be fitted with colour filters. Easy. The next bit is a bit more complicated. Sometimes you only want light in one plane of orientation. I will explain why in a minute. Say you only want light in the 12 - 6 plane. This is what polarising filters do. They have a very very fine set of lines on them that only lets those photons through that are in the right plane of orientation. Like say if you stood over a road drain with slats on it and dropped a packet of uncooked spaghetti onto it in random orientations. Only the spaghetti that was in the same orientation as the grating would get through. The rest would bounce off. This is what a polarising filter is doing, only the photons in one plane are getting through. Looking at a slide in this light is called 'Plane Polarised'. With me so far? The polarising filter goes between the lamp and the slide so the slide is only getting polarised light through it. What would happen if you put another polarising filter over the slide at right angles to the first one. That's right, no light can get through. Like 2 drain covers. What one lets through the other catches. But that's not strictly true. Whatever is between them could be acting like a mini prism, in effect rotating the photons slightly. Thus a few make it through the second polariser because their plane of orientation is no longer at right angles to the second polariser. Doing this is called looking in 'Cross Polarised Light'. OK I am going to find a picture of a rock thin section to illustrate why this is useful.

This bit from my website might help you verify whether I have got it right and might help you remember it too. Home - Dalton Tree Solutions