daltontrees

I'm surprised you narrowed it down to just a few, you must have a bigger library than the Council.

It'd be a great contraceptive. 1. No social life therefore won't meet any women. 2. Even if you do you'll be a proper tree bore and she won't want to have babies. 3. You'll be too exhausted to do anything else in bed but sleep. 4. Youwon't want kids because they will become less interesting than trees. 5. After paying the course fees a family will become an economic impossibility.

Maybe next year, I'd like to see carving being done.

Myerscough says minimum 15 hours a week for 2 years. That's a lot if you are working and have family.

I think the best single book is Peter Thomas's Trees: Their Natural History. £8 on Amazon. A really good introduction but quite a lot of depth too.

The problem with top handled saws on the ground is that he HSE has a problem with it. They have prosecuted for this. It's like everything else in the business, everyone loves to rant about H&S madness but the rules are there for reasons even if you could go through a whole long life never getting kickback off a topper the HSE says if it can be used one-handed the temptation is there and people will and so there is an unacceptably high risk of someone getting hurt. People do it all the time, 200T running beside the chipper to be picked up to prune a stem that won't quite go in itself. Use a tophandled saw in an assessment, instrant fail, you won't even get to finish the assessment. Use one in a tree one-handed when you could have used two or got in a better work position and used two, instant fail. Use one on the ground ina construction site with a HSE bod there, red card , you're off site and losing money. Me, I stick to the rules not because I am scared to break them or don't know when it's safe to, I just prefer not to have to think about things like that day to day or have the apprentice think it's alright to break the rules then have to pick a 200T out of his forehead the next day. Plus (and this is a big one) I like to keep my tophandled saws clean and razor-sharp for up-tree work, and I rarely have to sharpen a chain, because there's no dirt up there to blunt the chain. Rules, as it is said, are for the guidance of the wise and the absolute adherence of fools, but I hope no-one lookingin on this thread thinks tha the industry endorses the habitual breaking of rules by anyone that thinks they know more about probability and human nature than HSE. Doesn't matter whose right.

Less aerodynamic, surely?

What game? The PTI set-up says "As a pre-requisite of attending the course it is fully expected that learners will have a detailed knowledge of tree biology, the tree as an undamaged self-optimised structure, biological and mechanical weaknesses, pathology, legislation, remedial options and their likely implications and the British Standard 3998 Recommendations for Treework." If you haven't got that, you will struggle, it's a 3 day intensive course and an assessment at the end where you have to produce a written report on a few random trees with no assistance from anyone in a tight timeslot. I'd add that if you haven't got that you shouldn't be doing tree inspections for money even if you do sneak through. When I did the PTI a few guys were trying to wing it on general contracting experience and they failed, one didn't even finish the course. And you probably won't get valid PI cover without this level of qualification. Surveyign without insurance would be nuts almost as nuts as anyone paying for a report that isn't backed by insurance. Surveying trees is easy. Assessing risk and making appropriate cost-effective recommendations that are relevant to the client's legal responsibilities and the physiological needs of the tree is a whole different ballgame. That's what quality is about. Do it right and it can be very rewarding, or I'd say don't do it at all.

[ame] [/ame] Placky bag 'durates' for 3 minutes. Drop an acorn out of an upper storey window, everyone from Gallileo onwards would guess it will accelerate (at about 10m/s/s) straight down, hindered only by air resistance. Velocity is speed plus direction so the concept of fall velocity is currently not really making sense to my slightly tired brain. Maybe I should read the article, but not tonight.

Keep us posted, will you? I've only seen P.l. suspects from a couple of metres away, not able to trespass to confirm my suspicions. I am pretty sure I saw one in Oxford last summer, the dieback had been so rapid that it was hard to comprehend how anything could take a tree from full vigour to fox-brown and completely dead so very quickly. There were such jitters about this disease a few years ago then it all went quiet. When you think how many Lawsons there are in gardens, it would eb quite devastating if it swept through the country. But it's one of those Oomycota I think, and maybe doesn't spread by aerial spores so much as by ground water, so maybe can be contained.

Please do it, I'd use it regularly.

That's what I meant, plus it sells the publications and does not endorse any other valuation method. Tree valuation systems, at least all the ones I have seen, share a failing and that is they are weak on published assumptions and limitations, unlike the Red Book which is as exhaustive as one could hope for. So the valuations they produce are inherently vague (that's the best single word I can come up with). I daresay a couple of pedants like us could debate this sort of thing ad nauseam until long after the rest of the world has switched off the lights and gone off to do something, anything, more interesting. I suppose I just wanted to make the point that studies like the Milwaukee one, ambitious and rigorous as they might be, have limitations and if one of those is reliance on CTLA and it has (and had in the earlier editions that must have been used) limitations then the conclusions of the study cannot be extended to other situations with a simple 'therefore'. That and the fundamental tenet of the scientific approach that correlation does not prove consequence. The extreme view is that the trees did not lose value, they never had the value attributed to them because their demise was foreseeable. They might even have been considered financial liabilities. But we tree folk battle with that debate to some extent almost daily.

And the ISA has a vested interest in not criticising CTLA even though it has very obvious failings.

Sorry but I'm not clear on this. Are you saying that the genus contained the first flowering plant? Or that it contains the oldest surviving flowering plant species It's hard to pin all this down, plus since that book was written in 1999 there have been strong claims from water lilies, amborella, foxtails and star anise. Nad perhaps there is a distinction to be made about the first flowering plants and the first terrestrial flowering plants. From what I can tell from a sift of conflicting literature the proptotype angiosperms relied on water in the reproduction process (and were aquatic rather than terrestrial) but it's not even clear if these can properly be considered angiosperms.

That's my thinking too, root or root collar dysfunction, affecting so far only one side. I'd pretty much rule out aphids, but you could check for black sooty mould adhering to shoots. More likely to be biotic than abiotic, but abiotic factors could be responsible partly, by stressing tree and making it more vulnerable to infection. P. lateralis is a definite possibility. You'd have to expose wood right down at the base to look for lesions. I'm not sure whether you would have to notify it, but if you have grounds to suspect it perhaps the FC would be interested in helping with confirmation. It would certainly rule out replanting with Chamaecyparis and probably Thuja, maybe Taxus. Again the FC might be able to advise, and I think they have already published something 'cos I read it somewhere a while back.

Where did you see it? It's not native to Sheffield as far as I know..

From my website Sept 2011 - Julian Morris Professional Tree Services

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_cleaning My sister has one, it is aaaaammmmaaaazing.

On Willow it is more ikely to be Daedalopsis confragrosa. simlar mazegill pattern.

Ficus religiosa?

A good study but there is a weakness in the argument. It can be approached from two different directions. The first is that it is a longstanding deficiency of CTLA that it does not take into account the life costs and expected duration nof a tree. For this reason, any tree of a species or in a position or of a size to do damage to a highway will probably occasion repairs which, if these will shorten its life, means the tree should be down-valued even before it is damaged and possibly even before it causes damage. The second is that those trees that were valued at $1,100 or whatever costed the city possibly millions of dollars of highway repairs. Was the inevitability of this reflected in the initial valuations? I am going to say almost cetainly not because CTLA doesn't allow for this to be done. As an epilogue, the failure of the trees that had caused so much damage that they were badly damaged during remedial highway works may have saved the city millions more in further highway repair works as the trees might have continued to outgrow their situation. Again CTLA does not allow for this to be reflected in valuation.

£48+VAT for 4 signs at A3 size, full colour, rounded corners.

I have the Vistaprint ones, never fallen off. Only thing is someone nicked a pair of them last year in Sainsbury's car park and then a customer called me up and said guys wt irish accents had turned up unsolicited to offer her tree work and because she knew of me by reputation she said it didn't sound like my style. Police got onto it. Next set of signs I get will say on them "if these are not on vehicle [insert reg no(s).] then they've been nicked".

The clue is in the name Downy/pubescens, the twigs on it are finely hairy, like teenage bumfluff.

There's no contest. I've got a Stihl cap, and it's rubbish. End of!