Figure 5: Bad to the Bone. When I share my Trees over
Time images on social media, it is the ones where trees
are occluding old wounds that are the most popular. It is
a "good news" story, I suppose—we all want a good tree to
do well and overcome its problems. However, not every
tree is a "good tree" that we should all be cheering on.
In the UK, mostly in the 1980s, European nurseries sold a lot of
clones of London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) that had a strong
tendency to fail at their branch junctions. Most urban foresters
became familiar with the problem as the trees grew quickly and
started failing regularly into our streets, city squares, and parks.
Pictured here is one of these clones, growing next to a car
parking lot in Bolton, Lancashire. The initial damage to the
tree's structure is very severe, but over thirteen years it has
produced a large amount of woundwood to recover. However,
it is still a brittle, undesirable clone—so I don't think anyone
should be cheering. Terminator-like, the problem will be back.
Although trees in the wider environment don't
really need our help, urban trees often do need
our help, giving the urban forester and arborist
some useful and rewarding tasks to under-
take, using their understanding of a tree's
biological processes to help it along its way.
That is the ideal, I would say—some harmony
and shared goals between trees and people.
34 CityTREES
