Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In article . com,
"Weatherlawyer" writes:

Anyone notice the root damage to the trees fallen in their area?

It seems to me that the way trees used to fall in the good old days
was with a ruck of soil upheaval with a root-ball of sorts.

I noticed a number of trees in council "tended" areas with the break
right at the foot of the bole. Is this something to do with the price
of weedkilling?

Sounds like a tree which had gone rotten, and should have been
spotted and removed as part of regular park maintenance, which
very likely isn't happening as much as it used to.

A year or so ago, several large trees around me were felled.
To my untrained eye, they looked fine, but once felled, it was
clear why. The trunks were probably 5' diameter, but there was
only about 5" of timber around the circumference, with all the
rest either rotten or hollow. Had one of those come down in
the gales, it would have done considerable damage.

Or is it just my point of view about the muddy rings the chancers
working for council garden departments leave around the trunks of
trees that are supposed to be in their care, clouding my vision?

?

I atttended a talk about trees by Ted Green fairly recently. He is
particularly expert on veteran trees which are more numerous in the UK than
the rest of Europe.

After the 1987 storm there was one area in southern England where virtually
all of the trees had been destroyed apart from a few that had been marked
with a red cross. However these trees had not been saved by divine
intervention but much more by the fact that the trees were old and hollow
and well butressed on the outside. The trees had been marked as they were
thought to be unhealthy and were to be cut down but this experience showed
that hollow trees are in fact strong. In fact is very likely that in all
very old trees the heartwood will have rotted away.

Alan