maven

It looked mostly good wood, with some upper trunk forks and branches having rot through the heart (which I obviously wouldn't use). It was just the comment of one of the chainsaw guys that he thought ash dieback meant that the wood would decay fast that made me doubt whether the wood that looked fine really was. This particular tree had the least obviously dead canopy of the three we have decided to fell*, but my neighbour was keen we cut it back or felled it as it overhung his greenhouse and he was concerned about falling deadwood. It is also about 20m from a power cable, so if it wasn't in good enough condition for climbers to work on it, it would have been a trickier job, as they couldn't use a cherry-picker - hence deciding to fell it this year, not wait longer. *We have a lot of ash trees on our 35 acre holding. Some seem unaffected by dieback, some have visible deadwood making up a proportion of the canopy, and two by the driveway have little living canopy this year, just leaves on skinny new branches that come from the trunk. We can leave some of the smaller trees to see if they survive, and one of the larger ones that is out the way to decay in its own time, but the two that overhang the driveway need to come down, and my neighbour was keen to also remove the one near his greenhouse, having had a bit of a scare when a 70+ foot poplar came down in the storm, and the insurance inspector said they all had bracket fungus and should be felled - leading us to now have 20 tons of poplar in our front field! I even wondered whether any of that was worth milling, once they have the rig on site. But poplar is not a very hard wood, so I'm not sure it would have as much use planked as the ash, so my only plan for it beyong firewood was to experiment with infecting some with chicken-of-the-woods.

We are felling 3 mature ash trees that have die-back. I had hoped to have them milled to make a table top and perhaps some counter-tops. However, I've been told that once there is the fungal infection the lignin in the tree starts breaking down, and the wood will begin to decay. Does that mean it isn't worth the time/effort/expense of milling and is only good as fire wood?

Thanks for all the advice. It does look like something has ring-barked it, and a squirrel is a likely culprit. I know opinions are divided, but we aren't really very keen to have anyone with guns on the site. The foxes, badgers and our cats seem to keep the population under control enough. And we have oaks from tiny saplings through to 100+ year old giants without any similar damage.

We've got 17 acres of woodland in Derbyshire. The newest part is a section I call Plantation Hill, where the previous owners seem to have planted a grid of very varied species on an acre or two going up the hill. The saplings were about 6-8 foot tall and approximately 5 years old when we arrived 6 years ago, and I'd guess there is spacing of about 10 foot between them (with a few self-seeded birches and sycamore infilling). The trees are about 15 foot tall, and wider now. As you can imagine, it is now quite crowded! I can see willow and hazel and various pines, some dead ash saplings (we've been affected quite badly by dieback). Near the path, there is one tree I think is Quercus velutina. However, today I noticed that the top half of the tree has gone brown, whilst the bottom half is still green. Looking more closely, there seems to be missing bark around sections of the upper trunk. I'm just wanting to check out what is going on, what we should do to try to help this tree, and whether there is any risk to other trees in that area (and if so, how we can protect them). We have some lovely old English oak nearby. We are amateurs, but capable of basic saw and chainsaw work.

I know nothing about tree law, but I did have a fall over a loose flagstone in a paved area of a town and learn that if it is not in an area demarcated as pavement, then - even when it is clear that pedestrians will walk there, and the surface is in bad condition and there are significant trip hazards - pedestrians who trip have a much harder job to make a case for a claim. If you were able to get rid of the tarmac and put down chipped bark so it looks like an area that bulbs might be planted under the trees, then this would give a visual cue that a pedestrian shouldn't walk there, and my experience suggests that if they did they would probably be considered to do so at their own risk.

Thanks, that's helpful to know. It sounds like in our situation, unless anyone local (to Matlock, Derbyshire) happens to want any to mill, it wouldn't be cost effective for us to do anything with it beyond chopping it up for firewood, as we have no footfall, and even very limited passing traffic. Plus we have limited drying space until our building work is finished (though we will eventually have a barn with very low cost heat from our GSHP where we will test out drying the ash once it is milled). I probably ought to ask another thread whether ash die-back affects the timber quality...

Sorry, that wasn't a brilliant explanation. Our neighbours are elderly and live in a bungalow. We live in an adjacent smallholding with 15 acres of woodland, and a few fields, all managed for biodiversity. The five poplars stood about 20 foot from their house, but thankfully the one that came down fell away from their house, crashing over the boundary into our field. It took down a section of our fence and boundary wall. They put in an insurance claim, but it would only pay for disposing of the one that fell, and not for removing the others that were at risk of falling in future, so they had to pay for that element. And it wouldn't pay to repair the boundary, unless we claimed it on our insurance who then claimed against them (and our home insurance only covers the house and domestic curtilage and not the field). The insurance recommended firm was going to charge £1200+vat per tree, which was beyond their means, so they found a local arb who has been felling them this week. They could only safely fell them into our field, and that meant taking down a section of another fence to give them access, and allowing their contractors to work on our land for four days with a lot of mess and noise. Our neighbours had nowhere to store the timber, nor any use of it, so they'd have had to pay for disposal if we hadn't adopted it. We said it was fine to leave us the timber, and we'd cover the cost of repairing the boundary fence/wall. Unrelated to that, we have four sizable ash trees with die-back. We need to fell at least two of them (one overhangs our driveway, the other is on a boundary with the same neighbour and overhangs his greehouse) which was why I had asked the same guys whether they could fell and plank them. However, I had been told poplar was not good wood for working with, so until I read this thread I had not considered planking any.

How did this work out in the end? I've got 5 newly felled poplars worth of log lengths with similar colouration sitting in my field (photo shows 2/5 of the final quantity), and need to know whether to plank any of them. They are from my neighbours side of the boundary between our two gardens, and one fell into ours during the storm a few months ago. His insurance is paying for it to be cut up into manageable chunks and the brash shredded, and he was told the others were vulnerable too, due to bracket fungus, so he has had the rest cut at the same time. We said they could be left in our front field to dry if we got the timber, which seemed to suit everyone. We've only really dealt with smaller trees ourselves to date, whilst these were 70 foot long, and were too big for us to fell, but we have made chairs from scratch and I'm keen to have a go at making a big table and some counter-tops, so I'm having an Ash with die-back felled and planked, as I know that will make good timber. But this post has made me wonder whether any of these poplars are worth planking, and whether they'd have any value to sell - either as logs or planks.