daltontrees

My randonm thoughts... For the raised floor area to be caused by a tree root, the root would have to have passed under or throught the kitchen substructure/foundation and then have put on annual increments for a good number of years. That means a healthy root that is getting all it needs, particularly water. So what would it be doing there otherwise? Passing through to somewhere else? You seem to have ruled that out. If it terminates under the kitchen floor it must be getting a steady supply of water. This could be ground water or pipe leakage. If it's the latter, removal of the leakage should arrest the problem. If it's not a solid floor, I can't see how a tree rot could be to blame. A twisted joist wouldn't even produce such localised swelling, you would see it over a larger area. But if you don't even know if it's a solid floor, the first and only thing to do is find that out. If it is, then it's quite a small area that could be cut out after examining and recording the parttern of cracks around the bump. A heavy solid floor slab won't lift locally, nor will a thin reinfoirced one. So the offending area might be a thin unreinforced slab that could be opened up with a bolster an hammer. Whatever's there will reveal itself. A tree root would probably need to be in almost direct contact with the underside of the slab. If I found a root I'd take a sample but I'd be tempted to inject some amount of systemic poison and if this is done at cambial level rather than right into the wood it should kill the root without carrying too much into the above-ground parts of the tree. If it's a leak, that will need to be addressed or the problem could recur and may be doiing other unseen damage. Another thought - protimeters are pretty good at checking moisture levels in concrete. Under vinyl will be a very distorted reading, so the whole floor would need to be stripped and left to air-dry well ventilated for a summer week before any meaningful readings could be taken. A protimeter will only give relative readings unlike the fairly absolute readings they give in wood.

Yes, but I was thinking of solid particles in the air.

That appears to be the right answer, I found myself in a situation yesterday in Edinburgh while surveying trees when a few neighbours came out to make sure the trees weren't getting chopped down and someone asked whether trees are good for an area. I bet they wished they hadn't asked, but among other things I mentioned was the volume of air trees filter and how they turn tiny particles into bigger clumps that get washed into the soil. It was good to share the understanding.

Hurrah, we agree! I have had horrible situations between neighbours where one has refused access with teh stated intention of making the job more difficult and more expensive for the other. The police got involved and an ASBO was issued. Finally, my daughter is right now insisting that I put a pink icon in this message so here it is

I'm all for education, every day is a school day here on Arbtalk. I can't say that my postings are any more right than other folks', most of the time, but there is a lot of rubbish talked and things cited as facts by people on Arbtalk but they are factually incorrect or don't reflect the true state of the law. Some of them are backed up by stubborn attitides, and at that point objectivity of perspective disappears and it just becomes vindictive. I think that all you can say about what's on Arbtalk is generally well-intended and based in some understanding of the law but it isn't entirely reliable and for sure isn't a substitute for structured learning through an authoritative source. Personally I can't easily stand by and see erroneous information passed off as correct. I think where the great strength of arbtalk lies is in gving a collective overview of the pragmatic approach that can be taken day-to-day in tree work. That doesn't mean it's 'right', but commercially we all have to cut corners or make compromises and more generally have to get on with things without stopping to take legal advice every time a twig might fall into a neighbour's garden. I expect the reason why there are not court precedents covering trivial encroachments and trespasses is that the courts do not concern themselves with them (de minimus non curat juris) and quite right too. Ordinary behaviour will always rely on ordinary ethics and attitudes towards other people, and the law only gets involved when the consequences of unreasonable behaviour are significant. So reliance on what is presented as acceptable on Arbtalk could lead someone into a situation where they are legally and technically in the wrong but the consequences have got to a scale that results in them being on the wrong end of a court decision. Not too late to un-learn the wrong version of the law, but it won't be a defence to say that someone on Arbtalk said it was OK however nice his watch and shoes were. I have no comment on your LA saga, I do work for LA's and I see both sides of the story. It probably merits a separate posting.

I don't know the species, but when cherries in the UK do this it is (in my direct experience only) because the stem has been grafted onto native rootstock, particularly Prunus avium. especially so on japanese flowering cherries but the big specimens are either sargentii on avium or ornamental vaireties of avium on native avium. One such example from Edinburgh last month. No small children for scale unfortunately...

It doesn't mattrer how many times thios issue comes up on Arbtalk, there are always new interpretations of the law and the question never gets answered. The origonal poist wasn't even a question, just an unattributed 'quote'. Meantime Dowsons Law seems fine insofar as deciding if the land owner who receives involuntarily fruit or prunings is a theif or not. But it says nothing about whether a tree owner, who might enter his airspace to prune an overhanging branch can chuck it down onto the poor man's lawn then go around and collect it, is in the wrong. Or whether he should cut it in small enough pieces that he can drag it back through the tree onto his own land. You can talk about common law and Mynors and adrmiralty law and whatever Lemmon precedents you want to, but in the end a court if asked to will look at what is reasonable. Or more immediately if someone chucked their prunings onto my garden instead of recovering them through the tree, and then wandered around nochalantly to collect them from my garden, I know who the bobbies would side with in the ensuing ugly altercation. Lazy! Inconsiderate. Rude! Unnecessary. Intrusive. Getting close to what the law would call 'unreasonable'?

Who the heck is Dave Dowson?

I think it's called inverted commas. Unless you mean some other two-fingered motion you might make to a neighbour?

See recent thread by Tom D, no-one over here knows what an arborist is, so they aint going to be especially impressed if you are a certified one. Also, ISA is not really 'International'. The UK chapter has just been dissolved.

Which? Subbies or lapsed pollards?

OK, checking the suspect figure about pollution filtering for a tree taking up 50,000 cu.m of air. The most polluted cities in the world have 100g/m3 of pollutants. That's 5,000kg of pollutants being filtered. 5 tonnes. A day? So here's the follow-up question. If the tree was a cooker-hood, the filter would be bunged up within a few hours. If the tree absorbed 5kg of pollutants a day, it would put on 1.8 tonnes of weight extra every year, and would probably collapse. But it doesn't. where does that weight go? I am taking the 50,000 cu.m. at face value.

Yes, but don't let it slow you down from posting daily. Us followers can do the double-checking. It might all stick in the memory better if it is read critically.

4 things You forgot garden centre sales.

I meant ot add, on Monday I dismantled a Norway Maple 17m high, it had a very very dodgy compression fork at a historic pollard point, but I swung a quarter of the crown off it . when we got the tree on the deck, I dissected the fork and while there was definitely a discontinuity of the wood across the fork I could see from the shape of the rings that the tree had compensated for the weakness in the most effective way. It's in the woodpile but I'll try and fish it out for a photo. Piin t is' it looked bad from the outside from the ground, but the more than compensated.

Sound answer, Gary. I wouldn't blink before getting up there. If it's a dismantle, get the spikes on and a swedish strop, spike up and strip it, leavign a few stubs to stop a whoopeee sling anchor sliding down, worst case scenario would eb to ratchet strap then brace a pair of weak co-dominant stems together at 1/2 height, then dismantle as normal. as Gary says, trees have probably withstood a lot and by the time you have the tops rigged off there's no force you could put on them by rigging that could make them fail before you get the whole lot down. A god risk assessment leave the final call to the climber who goes up as far as a weak-looking union. If the climber is experienced, qualified and sensible, it's then quite appropriately his call. When I see weak pollard unions from the ground I am naturally cautious, they look like text-book hazards, but when you see them up close from a harness you generally realise that King Kong could fight off a squadron of aircraft from them and the unions wouldn't be troubled. So, standard climber-knows-best RA clause. Otherwise, go for it, if you don't someone else will.

I told myself that if it was north of the Manchester/Sheffield parallel I would go, but it aint so I won't. Kinda works in my head like £500 for the gig including accommodation, 2 days net loss of earnings getting there and back, 3 days loss of earnings being there, plus travel costs, plus the amount needed to compensate me for the mind-numbing journey, minus the huge professional and personal benefits of attending. It's slightly in the red. Not to mention the in loco Myerscough beer costs. Maybe next year. C'mon AA, trees do continue north of the Watford Gap!

I saw one out on survey today. The leaflets have a notch near the base, and it's pretty much the standard check I do to eliminate all other possibilites. The alternative is to climb it and fall to the deck as a sound-looking branch gives way beneath you.

For various reasons I think I am fairly familiar with this location. Would I be right in saying that the land to the north east is the subject of feisty local opposition to the sale of community land for development by GCC? There is a genuine difficulty - people on arbtalk are incredibly generous and skilled with their advice but they can only give general advice if they can't see the specifics of the situation. Some of the advice you have had so far is sound enough but dare I say suffers from over-generalisation to cover situations typical in english law (especially common ownership law and conservation areas) and english geology and climate and rights to light and ignoring how the role of Factors can be enshrined in deeds of condition for tenements. I have been working on a situation like yours behind a southside conservation area tenement for 5 years, if it wasn't being done for my brother-in-law (i.e. no prospect of a fee for my advice but an ear-bending if I don't give it instantaneous priority every time a leaf floats down) I woud have walked away from it 4 and 11/12 years ago as a complete financial no-hoper. The trees are 10 metres higher than the top of the top flat of the tenement. I'd say initially that giving you general advice on this forum will not get you the right answer. If you PM me I might be able to point you in the right direction buy refining the question. I'm not touting for business but from my experience you probably need the sort of bespoke advice that you won't get for free and which few contractors will be able or willing to give you (for free or otherwise). You have my sympathy about poor daylighting. Anyway, please feel free to PM me and I will see what advice I can give for free.

definitive? no such thing! Captive eyes are going to be a pain in the proverbial, they can't just be clipped to a sling. I just take up a set of slings of various lengths and a set of krabs. If you're doing every branch is a whorl of 6 and clipping them all before starting a saw, you will need at least 2 lengths of sling, maybe 3. If you use captive eyes you'll juyst be constreaining your choice. And those things are aluminium. For me that's a no-no for zipping.

I was lucky to get a load of fairly cheap swing-cheek pulleys a few years ago, and I use them in preference to krabs when either the piece is heavy or the zipline is at a shallow angle. You just need to feel the heat of a krab immediately after zipping something big in a shallow line to realise how much of the potential energy that has been n converted to frictional heat has been absorbed by the metal. It's never going to melt steel but it could be enough to cause microscopic recrysytallisation and the start and propagation of hairline cracks. I wouldn't really be worried about them wearing through, you cluld easily see whether that is happening, it would be brittle failure if they take a bit of a twist or a jerk. Aluminium doesn't hav ethe density or structure to absorb this amount of energy, and aluminium has been known to crumble when heated. Overthinking these things as I can't help doing, I have a sort of formula in my heads as to when to use steel krabs and when to use pulleys. It depends on how much of the potential energy will have to eb absorbed by friction. Big conifer limbs have a lot of drag, and air resistance takes up a lot of their energy on teh way down. They don't seem to heat up krabs the same as the equivalent weight of bare wood. Pulleys bring the pieve down quicker, and more of the energy is absorbed on the final impact (the piece hitting the ground), meaning less needs to be absorbed by the rope and the krab/pulley. We had fun a couple of months ago zipping down a big Douglas Fir, the guys set up 'skittles' of ringed up wood on the lawn and when I zipped the next bit off I tried to judge the sling length just right so that I took out the skittles. On the very last shot before we switched to chogging down, I got a perfect 'strike'. One of the guys filmed it on his phone, I keep meaning to get it from him.

Scary story there at 13 minutes in!

It would seem that the courts are greatly assured when a landowner has a 'system' in place. If it is not documented, it is not damning, but it certainly makes the proof of 'care' easier. If as you say you have dealt with all the suspect stuff, firstly the likelihood of someone getting harmed is reduced and secondly the landowner clearly does toake a responsible approach. What isn't clear is whether it is you or it is the landowner that spots the 'suspect stuff', and whether this is spotted during a systematic inspection or is just noticed in passing. The relevance is that the courts have differentiated between the degree of care required of a landowner in looking for suspect trees and the that required of someone called in by the owner to follow up its suspicions. If you are in any way involved in avising what work needs done rather than just being a contractor, you may have a wider 'duty to warn' if you spot anything that you are suspicious of. So be careful. For similar reasons you need to be careful about putting or finding yourself in the position of advising the landowner how to dioscharge his duty of care. That you have asked the question here indicates you parhaps don't have a full enough understanding of the extent of the duty of care to be taking on the advisory role. But to your credit you quote rightly don't want to put the client to the expense of what might be an unnecessary survey. David Humhries has commended the NTSG publications to you, which is a very good starting point and possibly all that you an the landowner should need to make sure the 'system' is adequate. But probably best if the last word on that decision comes from the landowner. It sounds like you're both close to it already, just neding to clarify the roles.

well apparently Abredeenshire down't. In the central lowlands edinburgh has had a good shot at it but in the end they all seem to say that it's up to the landowner to know whether there's a TPO or not. There shouldn't be any excuse, if you own or buy a property it should be known to you whether there is a TPO in place.

I haven't come across a Council in scotland yet that has a list, online or offline. I'm pretty sure that after several Local Government reorganisations they don't know themselves what Pos there are. I fin doubt, email an enquiry to AC.