daltontrees

My Strat and Les Paul, the Stihl and Husky (in that order) of electric planks, don't you think?

I can't pretend to have any experience of the English system, but if there is any rule about not killing the trees it isn't in the Act it must be in guidance and a matter of sensible interpretation. Maybe you know how it is with conifers, though, you top a spruce and it gpoes into slow decline. Trees behind it lose companion shelter and are windthrown, domino effect follows and so forth. Not qute killing the trees due to High Hedge action, more like causing them to die. I expect then the TO will have to walk the fine line between allowing light in and not killing the tree. That wil be hard if the required height reduction is substantial.

My experience of how TOs up here feel is similar to yours. This new law is going to be hard to manage, especially on top of existing pressures and under-resourcing. There was some talk of the Scottish Goverment creating a Chief Tree Officer position in Edinburgh to try and produce better central guidance. Now, there's a pooisoned chalice, however well intended the idea is.

Well, funnily enough one of the concerns expressed by the Tree Officers Association was the situation where forestry-type shelter belts back onto houses and where a forced reduction could kill the trees by topping and destabilise the rest of the stand.

Next Royal Assent is needed. Yes, the braveheart independent scots must ask the Queen, 'scuse me ma'am but would it be alright if we have a law about high hedges? Then the Scottish Meenisters have to set a commencement date currently forecast as April 2014. Meantime guidance is to be drawn up for the poor reluctant Council Tree Officers who have to sort out the mess. The one glimmer of hope, being a surprisingly common phenomenon in my experience, is that the law will be so poorly understood that no-one will want to take it expensively to court and instead everyone will muck through and tiptoe around the difficulties. Ultimately the test is not so much about what a hedge is but whether and to what extent a group of boundary trees 'adversely affects the enjoyment of the... property... which an occupant could reasonably expect to have'. The lawyers are going to have a field-day with that. I think the wording differs a little from the English Act viz. 'height of the high hedge is adversely affecting the complainant’s reasonable enjoyment of the ... property'. Apart from teh grammar it is s slight improvement on the English wording because it relates to a hypothetical occupier rather than the actual occupier, thus leading to a more reasonable outcome, but nevertheless the measure of what an occupant 'could reasonably expect to have' is going to be very elusive and subjective.

Nicely said. If you have to lower bits you need CS41, if you are leaving any of the tree alive it is pruning, CS40 needed. If you can take it apart and throw or freefall every bit and if necessary fell the pole from the ground you just need CS39.

I am unashamed to be pedantic on this particular point. The Act says that it applies to hedges "which ... are formed wholly or mainly of a row of 2 or more trees or shrubs ..." So, firstly it has to be a hedge. Next for the Act to apply it has to meet the additional height, barrier to light and number of trees test. The dictionary definition of a hedge suggests a linear form or a boundary position. I think you can view the seemingly stupid opening wording of the Act as a relic of when it only applied to evergreen/semi-evergreens. Before being meddled with at the last stroke by MSPs who had no advice to guide them on the implications of the change because to that point they had accepted the advice not to make the change at all and so had not had to hear a full debate on what the knock-on effect of the change would be.

Very very helpful sir. This is the key though, the Parliament makes the law the courts decide it, in between the Tree Officer has to interpret it and get it right, if he gets it wrong and it is challenged in court the Council is to blame not the Government. I imagine it is tricky to get right with conifers but when you bring in broadleafs it has got to be almost impossible in some cases. The Government can produce all the guidelines it wants but they are not law. Once again, it is for Parliament to make law and for the courts to decide what it means. There are other examples in the Act where the language does not even make grammatical sense. How is the common man, the citizen of the land, to understand his rights and duties when the law is not even written clearly in his own native tongue? I find that quite depressing for the future of society.

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.