daltontrees

Sorry guys I have calmed down now. I wouldn't dream of doing what they did in the video the way they did it any more than I would slash their tyres. I will say again what the problem is. They broke the law by wilfully obstructing the road. Their traffic management is rubbish to non existent. It's not safe and it's not courteous and it's not professional. And anyone watching it on You Tube might think that this is how tree surgeons are allowed to operate, then imitate it. Then we will be reading about a fatality or injury somewhere and giving it the usual tut-tut-cowboys chat here. I spec, price and do jobs properly. Most of the time the traffic management seems unnecessary but anything else is just gambling. I can't compete with guys like this that underprice and take chances and cut corners. Nor do I want to. I have just spent the afternoon taking half a horse chestnut tree off a doctor's surgery roof. It snapped off at 10 metres and flew another 10m sideways and impaled itself in the roof. One limb went right through the slates, the sarking, the attic, the insulation and the ceiling and if you had been standing in the room it would have gone through your head. The whole thing was about the size of that tree those guys felled. I do not think it is ridiculous at all to foressee that a limb could penetrate 3 inches of tarmac and damage services. Or even not penetrate but crack a buried cast iron pipe. Do you think these guys assessed the risk of it and deemed it so small that they could overlook it? No, I suspect it didn't even occur to them in their haste to close the road and make a quick buck instead of doing a proper and considerate job using only half of the road and more than 3 cones. There, I have let off steam. Back to business...

No way is that a Council job, if it was it would bhave been done slowly. It is a criminal offence to obstruct a road. These tossers should get prosecuted. They also could have ruptured a gas main. If I was the driver of that car that will have to wait while they clear the road I would have ripped one of the chainsaws out of their hands and slashed the tyres on both their trucks and chippers. See how they like being inconvenienced. Hiviz on these guys is just for making it easier to find victims.

What? Not one single comment? Sorry to tell you this Paul T (you can probably tell anyway) this thread is dead. Just one cornetto, give it to me! Not a soft dutchman, it's easy. I'll make i swing, through 45 de-grees who needs a SD, and a 180ee?

Poplar, including Aspen, is amazing! Wet and heavy off the tree but drying quickly to very light weight. I use it to get the fire going. Poplar has no heartwood, it doesn't have the ability to put on all those tars and phenols and difficult oily things that are a problem for chimneys at lower temperatures. And it leaves (almost) no ash.

What a refreshing perspective! My instinct has been that there is no absolute legal duy to keep the road free of obstruction. What you have said backs that up somewhat. After all, the Roads Dept has an obligation to keep the road serviceable, but if you hit a pothole and break an axle you have to show that someone else reported the pothole a couple of months ago and that the Roads Dept has done nothing about it. Back then to my bugbear. If it is not an ofence unwilfully to obstruct the highway with a branch, how can TPO exemption be claimed for preventative pruning?

Hawthorn's my favourite too. Followed by Beech. For a stove, that is. Open fire might be a different matter.

It's all very well resenting this sort of ill-informed journalism, but is someone going to send a stiffly worded letter to the paper that they can publish, one that will set the record straight? What makes a "bona fide" tree surgeon? I would say qualified, insured, experienced, licensed waste carrier and accountable by having a permanent office base with a land line number.

The tree was an Alder, characteristically going a screaming orange colour when cut. Sorry if you can't make out the tapered hinge.

Here's a couple of pictures of a successful Soft Dutchman from Monday. I have chopped the top off the stump (obviously) to take it home for photos. Looking at it side-on you can see a series of near horizontal cuts. These allowed the butt of the stem to sink temporarily into a soft compressible scoop formed by the overall amount of wood removed by the kerfs. The cuts don't go so far around as they get lower. There is a good reason for this. Imagine you are standing at the base of a gangly tree. The tree leans slightly to your right. You want it to go left. Without wedges or winch or pushing. Let's say it's too big to push and too tall to put a line onto an upper branch to pull. You basically have to put a humboldt sink in 25% (american style, sink is upside down). Then do a deliberate dutchman on the horizontal cut on the side away from you. Just to achieve another 10% of the diameter. Then you have to do a series of progressively less deep cuts into the underside of the sink. See photo Then you have to put your normal back cut in but with a tapered hinge (narrowing away from you). At the last moment and the hardest bit to do is swing the saw round to the offside and cut through the thinnest tip of the tapered hinge. You know this is gouing to trap the bar but it doesn't because of what happens next. Pull the saw out sharpish and stand back and watch... The stem starts to fall right and slightly away from you. Then it's weight causes its butt to sink into the scoop created by all those cuts into the underside of the sink. Those thin layers of wood bend or crack, converting the rightward drop of the stem into an away-from you drop, held by the thickly tapered hinge. By now, you should be marvelling at the graceful arc of the stem as the rightwardward weight converts to leftward momentum. As the stem gets to the most away-from-you point, the slices run out and the scoop gets smaller, eventually turning into a normalish left-sided sink. Now you can watch and wonder as the stem stops going away from you and its weight and momentum pull it round to the left. Then the hinge gives way as normal and the stem plops down on the left side as planned. It's a blessed miracle. Right lean becomes left fell. I am thinking of it this way. The equivalent of a series of cornettos. Each one tricks the stem to go a little further left than it would. But once it starts moving the trickery becomes easier. And when you add up all the tricks, it has gone 180 degrees.

Do you know what the 'fungal pathogen' referred to is?

I found this wee article quite illuminating. Elderly oak tree is succumbing to disease at Jack London Park

The Highways Act 1980 (s.137) says that " If a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway he is guilty of an offence and liable to a fine ..." This is taken by the courts to be the obstruction of the road by temporary occupation such as scaffolding, burger vans, demonstrations and so forth. I am not at all clear that it is intended to include trees, which don't intuitively seem to fall into the category of wilful obstruction i.e. deliberately doing something rather than letting some state of things come to be. I think it would be useful to know for sure whether pruning back branches that might be causing an obstruction, but without having been told it is an obstruction, is exempt from TPO controls.

That's very good of them to be so clear about it. But if you look at the Highways Act there is no duty to keep roads and footpaths clear of obstructions. The only absolute requirement to do so is when notice is served on you. Only then are you complying with an Act of parliament and therefore entitled to enjoy the exemption. Isn't that right? And is Basingstoke saying that you don't need to apply to remove an obstruction because if you do they will approve it anyway? A subtle distinction, but they may be exercising a blanket deemed approval rather than following the letter of the law. I'll feel suitably vanquished, humbled and enlightened if there is some law somewhere that says a tree owner has to keep the road and footpath clear of obstructions.

I don't disagree with you. All I am saying is that if yor tree is obstructing the highway it is not a defence to say that you cannot remove the obstruction because the extent of the work needed does not comply with BS3998. If the amount to be removed exceeds 3998 it may be bad for the health of the tree. But that has to be (in law) a secondary consideration. Of course, any half decent Arb will make the final cuts as sympathetically and as compliant with BS3998 as possible.

When you say you have been asked to appease highways, you have not said you or the client has been served with formal notice by Highways. If not and it has only been an informal letter or verbal request, you have no formal authority to do work on TPOd trees. If you have formal notice from Highways you don't need TPO approval. Either way you should call the TO. It'll take 5 minutes and can only help. People on here are saying you must follow BS3998 or do work to acceptable arboricultural standards. Where does it say that? If a branch is blocking a bus route and has to go, the consequences for the health of the tree are inconsequential. I believe you should do what needs to be done to comply with the Highways requirements, no more and no less. If that means a crown-lift beyond the BS3998 limits, so be it. As my pedantry knows almost no bounds, I would also suggest that you are not 'abating an actionable nuisance' as Skyhuck has suggested (and with total respect for his invariably great posts) but are instead possibly complying with a statutory requirement. An actionable nuisance would arise only from a common law encroachment but since Highways authorities vest only in the solum of the road and not the ground beneath it or the airspace above it they might have no such common law right to seek action against a nuisance or to self-abate it. If such, the tree owner has no such locus to abate it. The Highways rights are entirely statutory, but fortunately for clarity their rights are very clear in the relevant Act(s). There's a possibility that if Highways has formally notified and you dilly-dally, the Highways will go in and do the work and bill your client.

A bit like, but not really. It also causes the tree to fall against its lean, which a tapered hinge will not do without a push or a pull. Last week's job proved increasingly difficult to get a good SD demo tree. Almost gale force winds on Loch Lomondside meant the one I did try wouldn't quite go without a nudge because of wind forces. It did swing round though and once started did a lovely sweep. I have the felling cut in the back of the truck, I will put a picture of it on here soon.

Looks like the developer has been caught offside here on two counts, firstly lack of felling license and secondly perhaps misleading Council on land onwership and therefore crown immunity. WEvery Council website I look at has something about trees and what the basic rules are and some sort of contact in the Council for 'if in doubt' queries. It seems a more appropriate and logical first contact for a resident than the Forestry Commission. The case you cite is reassuring insofar as there is good dialogue between FC and Council and that they understand their interface. I shall look at all the attachments. Sad as it may seem, I love all this procedural guff. Thanks for posting.

I'd go along with the AA guide. It is a good start, and as one comes to appreciate that many fungi on and around trees are inconsequential, it is quite a good finish too. However, in isolation it might be hard to understand the decay strategies and rot types and how significant they are. So if you don't have that basic understanding you might also need something like Fungal Decay Strategies (Schwartze, Engels, Mattheck?) which also has a decent section on the key species of fungi that is as compact as the AA guide.

T'were the soft dutchman. 7 cuts in all. Might get a chance again tomorrow.

Well, if biotroph is literally dependednt on living tissue, then I can't see C.putanea being one, because it's quite happy munching away at long-dead floor joists.

Well, I managed one today, and I tell you what, it's the devil's work. You can get a left leaning tree to go right without ropes, wedges, winches, pushing etc. I watched with amazement as the tree swung away from me then back to the right then landed exactly where it ought to have. Unfortunately I had no camera with me. Maybe tomorrow I will get a picture or two. I've worked out how it happens too, it's cunning and magic and now I want to do them all the time. Except if there is something to hit if I get it wrong, because the cuts have to be bang-on, and even then I can't vouch for how well it would work in some species. If I can't get a video or pictures I will post a sketch and maybe an explanation of how and why I think it works. Woohoo!

As far as I can tell they don't do anything a tapering hinge and a wedge doesn't do better. I have about 100 trees to fell tomorrow (and every day for the next week) and they need to be swung away from a loch, so I'll have a go.

I don't have access to those papers, hopefully someone can post a summary? It would be an odd strategy for a fungus to be biotrophic and to cause brittle failure (and presumably death) of the host.

As I have already said, there is no scottish equivalent to the english/welsh legislation. A useful recent case that discussed liability in the face of evidence of tree defects is Selwyn Smith v Gompels 2009.

I remember C. putanea from my surveying days as the commonest species of wet rot. It will not occur in dry wood, typically below 16% moisture content. I suppose most of the evidence about it's mode of operation is in buildings on dead wood. I have no idea whether it is also active on living wood.