daltontrees

Mr Av, I see you are back in the country as you have been posting about QTRA on UKTC. I would be interested to a completion of our education about QTRA here when you are fully unpacked and are taking a break from provoking your adversary on UKTC.

The fees are a bargain, even to the frugal scots. The people who will be using this law the most will consider the fees to be pocket money compared to the benefits and how mighty it will make them feel. There was quite a lot of debate about the fees. Even a suggestion that the hedge owner should pay the fees. The way I look at it is the applicant is gettting a right to light in perpetuity. Get two lawyers together to draft and agree a servitude right to light and record it in the public register and you won't get any change out of £1000. And why should the poor b***er who has to pay to have his hedge cut down for somebody else's benefit have also to pay for the legal process that protects that person's right in perpetuity? Thank goodness the suggestion of loser-pays fees was binned. Although without even this much quality of reasoning.

Ahh Mr Blair, the first to point out that it is bonanza time for tree cutters all over the country! I of course will try and get my fair share of that work. I am more disgusted witht teh lack of thought and the politicising that went in to this shabby law.

I believe the Council will be able to specify when the reduction is done, so nesting and breaches of the Wildlife & Countryside Act can be avoided. As a precaution I suppose Councils will always specify cutting out of nesting season for conifers.

I couldn't resist looking it up on a satellite image, no-one lives in teh shadow of this particular hedge. But it doesn't have to be a managed hedge since a hedge can also be a line of trees ona boundary, unmanaged or at least not formally trimmed to a face. These are the trees I fear for.

You have got straight to the practical difficulty. You won't be surprised to know that the Tree Officers Association was against the inclusion of deciduous trees.

Indeed! It was even quoted by a lobby group of an example of how deciduous trees can be a barrier to light. The hedge is a national treasure yet if you lived in its shadow you would be within the law to aplly to have it cut down to a height that gave yoyu reasonable light.

Worse than that, politicians imagine they know everything about it.

As regards TPOs, the Act says "The tree preservation order shall have no effect in relation to the initial action or any preventative action specified in teh high hedge notice". How that is going to work in practice is a mystery, it kind of suggests that the High Hedge issue trumpos the Tree Preservation issue, but it is not that clear. Honestly, of all the ways that they could have stated that 'if trees in the hedge are subject to a TPO cutting the tree back as part of a high hedge is OK', they maybe could have got my 3 year old daughter to word it better. During the call for evidence I suggested in writing that the wording be clearer and that trees in conservation areas be clarified but the committee didn't even look at mine of about 50 other written submissions.

I will give you the exact wording. "The act applies in relation to a hedge which (a) is formed wholly or mainly by a row of 2 or more trees or shrubs (b) rises to a height of more than 2 metres above ground level, and © forms a barrier to light." The only difference I can see from the english Act is the removal of the words "evergreen or semi-evergreen".

This will be irrelevant to anyone south of the border but might be of rhetorical interest anyway. On Thursday the Scottish Parliament approved the High Hedges (Scotland) Bill, Subject to Royal Assent and a commencement date it is law. Fine, you might think, England has had such a law for a few years. Ahh, but not like this one it hasn't. The law has come about because of a Private Member's Bill. It started off as a carbon copy of the relevant section of the English Antisocial Behaviour Act which deals with evergreen or semi-evergreen high hedges. The Scottish government consulted on this a few years ago. There was a general view that Scotland needed such a law. Fine, all through the committee stages it got widespread support. A few amendments were debated, including whether it should be extended to cover deciduous trees. A delegation from the Isle of Man was brought over to talk about its unsuccesful experience of trying to make such a law work for deciduous trees. In general it was concluded that the amendment should be dropped, for very good reasons. Fine so far. Then on Thursday the full Parliament decided to change the Bill again to include deciduous trees. And immediately voted to make it new law. A law that was really meant for Leylandii hedges now also applies to 30m high oaks, limes, ash, sycamore etc. Try cutting one of those down to 2m and managing it as a viable hedge! We should call it the High Hedges (Scotland) Act of Stupidity 2013. If anyone is in any doubt about how I feel about this, let me be clear. I am horrified by the consequence for trees and their owners, embarrased by our politicians and disgusted at what this all says about democracy.

I don't know. That will be for the client to decide. Having a TPO on this tree would maybe have made little difference in this case. Because it is on public land and fullly accessible in theory anyone could have done the damage, it would be circumsdtantial evidence to attribute it to anyone in particular. A statutory offence might be easier to define i.e. wilful damage or wilful destruction but the measure of fine or compensation would still be messy to work out.

The way I have always thought of it (and please please if anyone knows different let me know) is that when a tree gets to the age when it can produce heartwood, every year thereafter when it puts on a new ring it consigns an old ring to heartwood. So if that is so evey year a ring of wood is converted from sapwood to heartwood. I have another unproven assumption that heartwood is produced from sapwood by the importation of substances from vigorous new wood along medullary rays and more generally by patrenchymal cells towards the older heart of the tree. Adding assumptions to guresses to hypotheses that would mean that fungi absorbing compounds from relatively old wood would have access to current contamination in the soil. Please feel free to strafe my speculation as ruthlessly as its unscientific origin deserves.

I was inspecting on behalf of a client so I ca only sy what anyone seeing the tree and following his nose cold have seen on or from public land. It looked to me like the initial damage was done by downward cuts at a very acute angel with a sharp light axe or machete and then the bark and cambum peeled downwarsda for 30cm where the strips were cut off there with a slightly less sophisticated and hacking cut. Anything that was missed by this was seemingly then given individual paring treatment again with light axe or machete.

Heartwood is old wood infused by the tree with dense complex compounds, exactly where you would expect heavy metals and other contaminants to be concentrated.

I cannot disclose the details and what might ensue but it is on public land adjacent to private residential property. Height 31m, DBH 72cm, hybrid poplar.

In the end I concluded that if I had taken in and remembered all that I had been told in lectures I would have had enough to pass. However, I went on the basis that if I forgot half of what I was told I needed to try and learn twice as much as I needed. A lot of the stuff that was really useful wasn't on reading lists it was on websites. I had to put together my own 'book' of pests and diseases. My first bit of advice is only to learn those parts of books and publications you need for the syllabus. For example, I got out my AA book of fungi and marked every page which covered a species that is on hte syllabus. The rest of the pages/species I wouldn't even look at. The good thing about the P&D 'book' was that everything in it was needed, no more no less.

Those limes have got a fighting chance, check this one out I found on Wednesday.

I passed last year or the year before and I haven't got a tenth of those books. Not even a twentieth. That lot would cost you about £2,000. If you could get them, some of them I suspect are out of print. If i get a second I will think of which books I found most useful. We were given a reading list that was a good bit shorter and was more than enough.

Thanks for suggestions. Extra photos of pore surface taken under microscope. I now don't think it can be P. fraxinea because it has fawn flesnh and is as touhg as old boots. I don't think it can be M. giganteus either, allteh other Meripilus nearby is mush. I took the pore surface pics to rule out Climacodon septontrionalis which has spikes rahter than pores. My original gues was B. adusta but the lack of any coloration of the pore surface. Ditto Aurantiporus which would have some pink coloration. I have to say of all the suggestions it is looking more like Pseudotrametes (Trametes) gibbosa than anything else for flesh colour, texture, pore surface, season, host species. I haven't seen it stacked like this before though. I have condemned the tree anyway due to its overall condition and position, so if I hear that it is being removed I will try and get some more data.

On second thoughts, then, maybe I will just pop down to Tescos instead and buy some mushrooms. There was I heard a case in the States where a family had eaten lots and died, the Laetiporous had been growing on trees planted on a contaminated site the trees had absorbed the contamination (which they were there to do) and the fungus had absorbed it and intensified the concentration of contamination.

Thanks, Mr Arnold, that is what I thought it was. I will get myself back there next year and confirm for sure. They say it's tasty too so I might try a wee bit.

Interesting candidate list so far Tony.

A client tells me he knows what this fungus is, but I can't see it. Does anyone know without prompting? On a mid age beech popping out of decayed wood at 1m and again further up on what seems to be several openings on a discontinuous internal crack. The white stuff is snow, obvoiusly, but it illustrates that this stuff is persisting despite some very very cold weather.

Could anyone be as kind as to proffer a second opinion on what this dried out specimen is? Plucked today with ease from a big tear on a 12m high 40cm diameter Oak at 3m. Light as a feather it was. And fairly crumbly.