Video Transcript
Hi, I am Neil from Beechwood Tree Care and being a big old tree geek, I’m incredibly lucky with some of the trees that I get to work with and some of the people that I get to work alongside. I was recently working alongside Guy Watson, who I have an incredible amount of respect for. He’s a really knowledgeable consultant and just a really all-around good guy.
He talks in this video about how when a tree hollows out, it’s actually not a bad thing. He’s actually just chatting to one of the National Trust gardeners, at a site that we were working on with a big London plane tree that was completely hollow. And he was just explaining how a tree hollowing out is actually a good thing for the tree, and actually for its structural and its physical growth it is okay.
And that’s kind of counterproductive to the way that perhaps we would just normally think. So I managed to capture it on video and I wanted to share it with you. Here it is:
It’s taking out that central column of the tree, which is irrelevant. Trees don’t need the middle grow and the outside each year. All the active transport is around the outside and trees not being stupid, they don’t need to maintain and defend on that, so they let it go into ‘Heartwood’.
So the centre of a tree will be really dark brown compared to the white clean wood around the outside. That’s the active transport, that’s the heartwood in the middle. It was active transport but isn’t now effective. The tree doesn’t need it because it’s going to produce a new one each year. It just pulls it out and it fills it full of phenols. So the centre of a tree is irrelevant both to vitality, physiology and structure.
It doesn’t need it because a cylinder is engineering. A cylinder is stronger than the solid. Next time you’re really bored, try and stand on an empty Coke can. Really thin shell walls, but if you load it directly across the top, so you really carefully stand on it, and really carefully keep your load directly down, it won’t crumble.
If you move sideways, it’ll collapse underneath and that’s what the cylinder is. That’s why that hasn’t failed. Because it’s still got a cylinder around the outside and in the really big wind it can twist a little bit. Whereas if I’m really solid, I’ll probably break.
So if you talk to the ancient tree forum guys and the veteran tree guys, the fungi that decay out in the middle of a tree is really good and it’s a symbiotic relationship and it’s allowing those big, old, solid trees to become lighter.
Because you take a load of weight out, and its slightly more flexible and therefore more resilient. And that’s why we’ve got ancient trees and that’s why trees can live for thousands of years because they kind of recycle themselves. All the aerial routing that’s coming down inside that as well, it’s gone down through that decaying wet timber.
In theory it’s all a natural process and it’s great and in a wild woodland and an ancient forest, it doesn’t matter if it falls over, does it?
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