Articles
As it’s that time of the year I wanted to write a festively themed piece to close the blog out for the year. This one’s a bit of a cheat as my chosen species isn’t a tree, but it is a woody plant and it’s one that almost everyone will see at Christmas. Mistletoe is one of our most mysterious plants, with an enduring role in our folklore and festive traditions. As well as a few musings on this subject you can also find out how to introduce mistletoe into your own garden.
Dartmoor Tree Surgeons have worked at Mobray Court in Heavitree for some years, undertaking regular safety inspections for the management company. The largest works undertaken to date at Mobray Court involved the removal of a very large Turkey Oak which had succumbed to honey fungus. We captured the dismantling of this tree using a timelapse camera which ran for the three days of the main take-down.
Have you ever walked past a team of tree surgeons as they are dismantling an awkward tree? Maybe there are powerlines running alongside the tree or a delicate structure that they have to avoid. A lot of people are interested in what we do and how we do it, understanding that that it takes a great deal of skill, experience and training to tackle a large tree as the wind blows and the rain comes down and every piece of material has to come down into an area the size of a small garden shed! That could be someone’s idea of a real nightmare, but to most of us it’s an enjoyable challenge that it is very rewarding.
From time to time we are asked to assess the structural integrity of a specimen which maybe raising concerns for a customer. An indicator of potential decay is sometimes (but not limited to) a fungal fruiting body protruding from the wood or root area around a tree, and depending on what species of fungi these fruiting bodies belong to, we can gauge whether a look inside the stem is necessary or not.
When they think of tree surgeons, most people think of climbers swinging round in trees, wielding chainsaws, their ground crews feeding cut material through chippers below. Not an unreasonable preconception either as this broadly covers the bulk of work undertaken by many tree surgery companies across the UK.
