You might recall we've been doing some tree-felling around home recently, on account of a number of big old trees that were diseased. Ash die-back is going through our country like a dose of salts at the minute - I don't know that many, or any, will survive and that's going to have a real impact on our landscape. We also had a couple of big sycamore trees that had fungi growing on them and apparently that's a sign that all is not well. Eventually, the tree will rot and usually from the inside, so you probably won't even notice - and that's a tad worrying when the trees are too close to the house for comfort. Here's another shot of one of the cut logs and you can see the beginnings of decay in the middle (eventually there'll just be a big hole through the middle of the trunk, as shown in an earlier post):
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| Via the 'Blad/150mm Zeiss Sonnar, FP4+ on Foma 133 paper. |
Are the problems anything to do with climate change? Or some disease that has entered the country?
ReplyDeleteA good question. From what I read, Ash dieback is caused by a fungus and apparently mild, wet winters are ideal conditions for the spread of it. Here in Northern Ireland mild, wet winters are the norm. The fungus might have originated from Japan but has spread throughout Europe and now the UK.
DeleteYou might recall that in 2015 I lost 23 ash trees in my yard to the Emerald Ash Borer. Is that little bug the problem where you are?
ReplyDeleteApparently it's caused by a fungus, Jim (see my reply to Marcus above).
Delete23 trees? You must have had a big yard! Did you sell the wood? I'm keeping the wood from our trees to burn in our stoves. which will be handy this winter given the price of kerosene. It's going to take some work to cut it small enough, but I did a deal with our gardeners to do the heavy work in exchange for half of the wood, so no money changes hands.
My yard was about 1400 square meters, minus the house that sat on it. It was also pretty heavily wooded.
DeleteThe removal of the trees generated an ENORMOUS amount of wood. That house was heated with an electric heat pump. Even though I had a wood-burning fireplace, I didn't use it much. So all of that wood wasn't useful to me. The company that removed the trees gave me a big price break in exchange for taking the wood, which I'm sure they sold.
Here's a post with photos of my house before and after the trees were removed.
https://blog.jimgrey.net/2015/06/10/goodbye-ash-trees-goodbye-money/