I was lucky enough to be at this year’s International Tree Climbing Competition (ITCC) and witness team NZ win again. Even though I have seen it before I’ll never get tired of it – New Zealand winning or the ITCC. I was judging at this year’s competition which was a first for me; first at ...
3327 words later it ends like this. It’s not so much that I don’t believe in the urban forest – it exists, it is there, I just think we are looking after it from the wrong angle. If ever there was a ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’ situation, then ...
Not being afraid to throw the proverbial cat at the pigeons, I have proposed a paper for the 2nd Asia Pacific Urban Forestry Meeting on why urban forests cannot exist… The myth of the urban forest Abstract: Urban forests are not naturally occurring mega-organisms, by definition they exist in urban and sub-urban areas in ...
The management of ancient and veteran trees has become very topical and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Managing venerable old trees requires a different mind-set, and I quite like that. Sometimes it’s best to throw the rule book away, do something drastic or sometimes it’s best to do nothing at all. But ...
There comes a point where you start to assume others know what you know. Not in a paranoid ‘they’re in my head’ kind of way, but simply because you take a piece of knowledge for granted. That knowledge ceases to be special to you, you know it, you have known it for so long that ...
We have known for many years that trees communicate with each other, that their responses to insect and/or animal attack can be picked up by other trees. We know that the attacked tree can send out warning signals to other trees and these signals can be very specific; e.g. they can differentiate between leaf eating ...
The Redwoods of Rotorua in New Zealand are arguably the most substantial and therefore the most important stand of Redwood trees outside of those on the Pacific coast of North America. Visit them you must, look but don’t touch. Over three and a half million people visit Rotorua every year. Not all of them pop ...
Star Wars has microscopic, intelligent lifeforms called midi-chlorians that live within the cells of all living beings. That’s science-fiction. Apparently, midi-chlorians influence the ‘force’, which is all important to the Star Wars story. Plants, on the other hand have micro-organisms that live between plant cells called endophytes. That’s science-fact. Endophytes can be all important to ...
A quick Google search will tell you that an ’act of God’ is an event outside human control, an event where no one can be held responsible. It’s an old-school term with legal status. I agree that people should not be held responsible for unforeseeable natural phenomenon, or even foreseeable natural phenomenon that people have ...
Recently I gave a presentation at the New Zealand Arboricultural Association conference, I pointed out that stress is an external force or an emotional condition, and that it is incorrect to say a tree is ‘stressed’ when not talking about external forces. Trees don’t get emotional. I wanted to point out that response growth can’t ...