by Mark Roberts | Mar 22, 2021 | Nature, Soil and soil science, Trees
When I was a young horticulturalist each and every soils teacher seemed to say something along the lines of ‘soil is soil and dirt is what you get under your fingernails’, some of them would go on to say that they were taught that, but it ‘reflected...
by Mark Roberts | Dec 13, 2020 | Trees, Uncategorized
A journeyman is an old-school term for a worker who is skilled in a given trade, someone that had completed an apprenticeship but had not yet mastered their craft. A journeyman was someone who had spent enough time working on their craft to have gained a qualification...
by Mark Roberts | Aug 23, 2020 | Nature, Trees
I have a wisteria that grows and grows, but where it goes nobody knows. I train it and shape it to follow a plan but it still it grows to follow its nose… and I don’t know why. As a self-respecting arborist, I dislike vines – with the exception of grapevines and...
by Mark Roberts | Jun 21, 2020 | Trees
New Zealand Arborists can’t prune. For some, a generic sweeping statement like that will be offensive, but some will agree. If you’re a kiwi arborist, and you’re offended, it’s probably because you can’t prune – this, you may well find offensive, yet others will...
by Mark Roberts | Apr 1, 2020 | Trees
This actually has nothing to do with Covid-19 or Cholera, which the title is very loosely taken from. If you cast your mind back a few months, the world was fixated on carbon-sequestration. It seemed like every few weeks another tree planting programme was...
by Mark Roberts | Jan 3, 2020 | Trees, Uncategorized
The Skype meeting was tedious and I found myself checking FaceBook. Checking FaceBook out of the corner of my eye; one can never look away from the camera during an online meeting. A discrete click, a sly scroll and ‘Pruning is cultural not scientific’, that’s worth a...
