Today I visited my favourite stub. Yes, A stub, not a pruning cut but a stub. I also got to try out my new rope wrench; its purple, so it doesn’t go as fast as the red ones and it’s not as cool as the black ones – the wrench worked well, the climber… not ...
Recently I was asked to review a unit of competency. When I say, ‘I was asked’ the ask was to industry, and when I say ‘industry’, it was the industry in the widest possible context, so really every man, woman, child and their dog was asked to be involved. I suspect cat owners weren’t asked ...
Tree or ‘crown shyness’ is where the uppermost branches of different trees in a forest canopy avoid touching one another. This stand-offish approach creates clearly defined borders when viewed from below the forest canopy appears to fit together like some crazy paving project with the sky highlighting each seemingly random shape. It’s well worth looking ...
As an arborist, I thought that I had a fairly good understanding of life and death – a dead dog is a dead dog, rabbits exist in two states (alive or dead) and Schrodinger’s Cat is both alive and dead at the same time (until you open the box), but then I met an ecologist ...
Choosing optimal and suitable trees for the right location, is a concept most arborists and tree mangers refer to as, ‘the right tree in the right place’. When Leon Minckler wrote ‘The right tree in the right place’ in 1941 the concept wasn’t necessarily new. Minckler’s focus was trees commercial forestry, but the principles described ...
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 ...
