Beardie

Have you asked them? Maybe they like the shade in summer.

Or try eBay.

The way some of the finer twigs have branched reminds me of elm.

Looks like a larch to me, the way the needles are in whorls around the stem.

That sort of smooth bark, pockmarked with old branch scars, would be about right for holly, albeit an unusually large one.

It seems to me that if NFU won't insure working at height, then quite a few activities on conventional farms aren't covered, either. Stacks of straw bales, anyone? Or covering a silage clamp. Even routine maintenance on the cowshed roof is out. I wonder if this is an issue with farmers; does anyone know one they can ask?

Yes certainly, but which snake-bark maple? There are several. Yours is probably Acer davidii or one of its cultivars, as A. capillipes and A. rufinerve have more lobed leaves.

You said in the OP that timber merchants were confused by the term. They are probably the wrong people to ask, as wood too thin for milling is unlikely to be dealt with by them.

15-20cm dia is a good harvesting size, but are they all like that? Half an acre is awfully small, and it sounds like a fragment of a single coupe which would have been felled on a 15 year rotation. So you need to work out how to turn this even-aged plantation into something more diverse. You could fell a fifteenth of the trees annually to maintain the cycle, but since they are already at harvesting size, the ones you cut in fifteen year's time are going to be pretty big, and fall pretty hard on whatever you have planted under them. Ah yes, the underplantings! you have already observed that sweet chestnut casts a lot of shade, and you will shortly find that they also shed immense quantities of very large leaves which take a long time to rot. This will bury anything you have planted, which will also be having trouble finding root-space in ground full of sweet chestnut roots. In short, I don't envy you for the task you have taken on. You would have to grub out or poison some of the stools to make way for anything else, and opening up the area to more light would cause the sweet chestnut to grow more branches, making harvesting and processing for firewood more difficult. Oh, and if you do go for hazel, don't expect hazelnuts if it's grown in shade. Have fun!

Wow, you struck gold there,didn't you? For some reason, wood is one eBay category dominated by people posting total rubbish and expecting a fortune for it. Nice to know it's not always that way.

Yes, I used to joke that I was an avid collector of aphids and small flies. Where did I keep them? All over the front of the car! That was in the mid-90s. The joke doesn't work now. Finding the reason for the decline is going to be hampered by a lack of detailed information about the problem. As Daniel Bos states, information only started to be collected in 1989; not only this but by amateur groups who haven't identified everything they've caught. And it's almost certainly a combination of factors.

Too boring to be a spoof. Probably demonstrated by someone who knows more about engineering this equipment than actually using it. And who composes the ghastly muzak which inevitably accompanies these films?

I've got some. Just need to borrow a UV light and get my digital camera up and running.

Sorry, Mr. Manwaring, it was in the wrong sub-forum.

Yes, apart from anything else, that's a remarkably sloppy piece of journalism which conflates three entirely different species of hornet. It's the Asian hornet, not the Asian Giant hornet, which has been found in Britain. Neither is the same as the hornets which caused the death in the article, which would have been an American species.

It appears to be box-leafed holly, Ilex buxifolia.

I have never seen an axe head attached to the haft like that. Maybe it's some sort of reproduction Mediaeval weapon, which would account for it never having been sharpened.

Sell them quickly, before they split! (I did not tell you this)

Yep, buds on stalks, don't know of anything else in Britain which has that. Elm buds are tiny.

Yes, some nice Perpendicular Gothic there, in what looks like Millstone Grit. The carved heads on the label stops are a nice touch, and the hooded mouldings are carried around the buttresses. Seen from this oblique viewpoint, this creates a pleasing repetition of form which draws the eye along the side of the church, then up to the tower with it's crenellated parapet. God knows what the tree is, though.

Probably as genuine as this one: http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/tornado-carries-mobile-home-130-miles-family-inside-unharmed/ In other news, man stuffs his head inside his wife's vagina, and electric shock therapy cures homosexuality.

The leaves look like walnut, though the fruits are a bit on the small size. Maybe it's the Texan walnut, Juglans rupestris.

They seem to be getting on fine without it in India. [ame] [/ame]The main targets for reforestation often aren't short of manpower. In any case, a project is more likely to succeed if the locals are actively involved, than if it's some Western expert parachuted in with his toys.

I call BS on this one. Firing a pellet of seed into the ground is not the same as planting a tree. It's a fancy technofix which fails to address many of the issues which cause deforestation, and anyway the firing mechanism would need to be pretty powerful to penetrate the iron-hard soil of subtropical Africa. Testing it on mining heaps in Australia is not quite the same. There is also the possibility of the scheme being dominated by commercially-important species at the expense of native trees of local provenance.

I think it is a bit misleading to compare knowledge of popular music with knowledge of who's who in the Royal Family. Musical fashions come and go, and individuals have their own tastes anyway. The Royals are an integral part of the way this country is governed and affect us all, even if we think things should be different. People of all generations should take an interest in factors which shape daily life whether we want them to or not. Celebrity culture is optional.