Back in March I left the job at Treeschool so I could once again return to technology as a income. That’s happened, but not as I expected it. Long story short on that, modern recruitment is vile and apparently impossible (at least for me) and “getting a job” didn’t happen. However, the wise rabbit always has two warrens and so I was able to turn to my own business as an income where I’ve been hard at work as a software developer / programmer contractor. A man must provide and so I’ve spent the last six months dusting off my programmer chops (and typing skills).

Tree Jamie

It's a publication about one mans journey to become better at technology related things with the odd tree metaphor thrown in .

I’ve also started a new substack related to my programmer life. You’re all here for the trees and the last thing I want to do is turn some of you off with programmer talk. If you want to go subscribe to that, you can find it at below.

Part of the reason I’d never really posted much here over the last few months was that I’ve done precious little tree work or woodland work. However, I have been hard at work in my spare time in the workshop (a.k.a the garage). In early September we had some car break-ins around the street. Nothing professional, just some skeevy smackheads looking for their next fix. They took a woodland key, about six pounds in loose change and most irritatingly my mora knife. I reported it to the police on the grounds that knife was razor sharp and ideal for murdering. It did get me thinking about security though.

This is how my workshop appears to the outside world. It’s a single leaf garage, kinda next to the house but not connected to it. To get to it, you have to walk over the neighbours drive. We had Velux windows installed 15 years ago when we had neighbours who refused to allow me to run an electricity cable to the garage. It’s a single leaf brick structure that I’ve spent nearly a decade making way over the top improvements to.

The workshop is largely responsible for me getting into tree world. It was the call of the woodworking as a means to escape the bits and bytes and get my body moving again. I started converting the “gym” (a.k.a the garage) into the workshop in 2017.

At first it was a lick of paint, a bench and a cabinet.

But then things escalated. Single leaf structures are damp in autumn and spring, freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer. So I insulated the ceilings and walls.

Thanks to the lockdowns I inherited a load of ikea desktops that I used as a cover on the walls. I painstakingly cut shuttering plywood into boards and used them to make the ceiling nice.

Then it escalated again. I decided to build a timber framed structure inside the garage to give me a storage space above my head. Fast forward three years and I’d made it.

But then I bought a woodland, chainsaws and started filling it with more stuff. Oh dear.

I was writing on here at this point but I started to get very freaked out about security and that brings up back to the recent break-in and how these two tales dovetail. You see, I’ve actually been making a load of progress in the workshop over the last few years, but the problem was sharing it. It doesn’t take a genius to get my actual physical address and I was (rightfully) concerned that talking about and showing pictures of easily stealable things was a silly thing to do. Remember, it was always just a single leaf, el-cheapo garage door protecting my gear.

I wanted very much to share this picture of a seriously neat garage. There’s a lot going on here (everything from above is below except the drumkit which turned into a chipper), but I always feared thieves.

If you’re observant, you’ll notice there’s no doors on anything in the above. The theme continued until June, when I realised I had to wage a war on dust. So I started putting doors on stuff.

Being super frugal, I glued up all the scraps of plywood to make these doors.

It is amazing how much less dust is kicking around. I’m getting way off track. Security, yes that’s what I was trying to write about. It was about the time I finished these doors that skeevy smackheads took what was not their from me. So I upped my security game.

First thing was installing two cctv cameras. Not Ring “subscription required” things, but mid-range Hikvision commercial grade cameras. I got them connected up to a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16gb of ram and a hailo 8 AI chip for object detection. I’ve now got 72 hours of rolling 4K footage and all “events” are saved in 4K and uploaded to “the cloud” (S3 for the nerds out there) where they are stored for one year.

Next I went to town on the Velux windows. You can buy locks for Velux windows but you can make your own version, so that’s what I did. Two M10 bolts and length of plywood. No one is opening these windows from the outside. I also placed material over the glass to prying eyes from seeing in.

This next bit was overkill probably but I built some grilles from rebar and plywood.

They went over the windows and attached themselves into the roof structure. They’re not going anywhere. So now the windows don’t open from the outside, no one can see what’s inside, and even if they chance it by breaking a window they’ve got to get through 16mm rebar spaced at 70mm. Not happening in a hurry.

But the final upgrade was at the front. The big single leaf aluminium garage door was always the weak spot. So yesterday I got the commercial grade thick, noisy bullet lock shutters on the outside. The internal door is still in there, so even if you did get through the shutters, or pick the locks. I’d hear them going up. They are loud and rattly. That kicks the cameras into capture mode and kicks me into “where’s my reasonable-force-with-a-bat mode”.

So basically that’s what I’ve been doing. Securing the workshop, upgrading the workshop storage whilst at the same time getting myself set back up with an income. It’s been a funny few months, but I thought it was time I posted something in case you all thought I was dead or something.

I’m not dead, just once again reconfiguring my life.

Thanks for reading - I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie

Four and a half hours later, it may be messy and look awful, but it is maintained.

Today’s post is about digging wet, messy, muddy channels. Let’s start off with how it became to be this way.

Neglect

There are many parts of the woodland that are “boggy”. Typically seasonal, they normally dry up by early summer and remain dry until winter rains arrive. This is a natural part of the woodland cycle. Water comes, water goes. If you were to pay attention when you walk around the wood you can see make out what used to be defined drainage channels, but there’s one problem – no one has been taking care of them for decades and as a result, they’ve all silted up and become grassed over.

Don’t get me wrong, a woodland should have areas of water. Ponds (small or big) are especially beneficial for wildlife and the surrounding ecology. Everything in a woodland needs access to water for photosynthesis, transpiration and respiration, so having water on the site is essential. No water, no life. The problem though is that this woodland used to be well drained. If I had to guess, I’d say the drainage on my area of the wood was last managed about twenty years ago. So that’s twenty years of leaf litter, silt build up, deadwood and soil erosion all preventing the flow of water through the woodland.

As the water stops, flow slows down, it starts to back up and before you know it, it get’s boggy. In boggy ground roots struggle to respire aerobically and so they end up respiring anaerobically, which affects soil pH, which has the knock on effect of ending up hostile to the tree species that it used to be hospitable to. The trees get stressed, they end up being colonised by saprophytic fungi and eventually they die and fail. This is what the birch are doing.

This is a very long winded way of saying, the drainage situation needs to be fixed.

The problem areas

Here’s a crude screenshot of a map of the woodland (it clicks through to the actual map). It’s a little out of date (an updated map is in the works) but it shows four main features. Blue bits are the water courses that I knew about when I was making the map back in 2022. Pink shapes are “amenity areas” and the orange shapes are the “rides”. Note the burn that runs to the north of the map and the water course that was present at some point at the north west corner of the woodland.

The elevation of the site is that south drains to north and ultimately everything should end up in the burn (Stanley Burn) which you can see on the map. It probably did optimally drain into the burn at some point, but decades of non-management of the woodland has left everything less than optimal. As you can see from the blue bits on my map, that sub-optimal situation of yesterday is now my problem of today.

My primary aim with this woodland is to get it back to an oak standards with hazel coppice. I have somewhat started on that process with the planting of 900 hazels and 300 oaks, but before I invest any more time I need to solve the problem boggy areas because they’re only going to get worse. If you’re unsure of a what a coppice with standards is, then the below video tells all in ten minutes.

Management approach is a subject for a different post, but a large part of my work in the woodland is removing mature / over mature birches. The birch steal precious sun light from the hazel and they also crush the hazel when the birch inevitably fall over. But removing trees is not that straight forward. Logistically, I can only remove less than five cubic metres in a twelve week period because I don’t currently have a felling license for the site. Also, by removing a mature tree you inevitably create standing water situation…

A mature birch tree may use between 20,000 - 45,000 litres of water between April and October when the tree is photosynthesising and in “peak production”. The root systems serve as hydraulic pumps which pull water towards the roots. As water moves through soil it creates a path of least resistance which ultimately allows more water to move towards the tree. If you’re a tree, thats expecting to live for hundreds of years, that’s a great thing to happen. But when you remove trees, that water still travels to the roots of the tree, but without a trunk and canopy to pull the water from the ground, it pools. If that water has somewhere to go (drainage), no big deal, the pool drains and the little channels in the soil silt up and close. But, if the water has nowhere to drain to, it’s going to stay in place, get boggy and make my drainage issue worse.

The soil’s behaviour is like an inefficient algorithm — call it O(n²). - a situation in which the inputs work together to create slow, hard problem to solve.

Did I mention the draining needs fixing?

The Tools of Choice

Ideally, I’d be using a mini-digger for this task. Frankly, in the ideal world I’d own a mini-digger. However there are three reasons I cannot have a digger on this work. Firstly, I don’t have any vehicle capable of towing a plant trailer into the woodland (I sold the Ford Ranger), and secondly, there’s no way I can access this part of the woodland with a digger because the ground is too boggy. Thirdly, money – I cannot afford a mini/micro digger at this point in time. Watch this space though, it’s a necessary tool and as I age, it’s getting prioritised.

So, without a digger, I was working with hand tools and I was powered by pork pies.

The pies are essential, they’re very dense source of energy that you can devour in a few bites. Anyway, the tools…

You don’t need much to get digging. The mattock is the main tool. It is the thing that does the digging, prying of rocks, chopping of roots and scraping of silt. The shovel (and yes, it is a shovel, not a spade) is for removing the earth to the sides of drainage. Wellies are optional, but they do prevent the feet staying soaking wet and making your books stink of anaerobic soil stank. My boots already smell bad enough with three years of sweat, there’s no need to add in soil stank into their aroma.

The Approach

Just jump in and start digging? Pretty much yes, but before you do, all of the tree related detritus needs to be removed and so you can swing your tools cleanly. Mattocks are great, but they are not axes or adzes, and whilst they’ll do a good job at getting through smaller roots, it’s pointless to use them to smash through roots in boggy water - these roots are best cut through with a silky.

Once you’re clean of roots and deadwood, it’s just a case of getting in there with the mattock, prying out all of the large rocks (precious resource) and putting them to one side, chopping up the silt so that you’re free to extract it with the shovel. Once it’s on the shovel, it’s flung onto the sides of the bank and I was using the deadwood as a barrier to stop it sliding back into the drains.

It is fun, but hard work and very satisfying. Here’s a little video of section that has been cleared looking onto a section that has not been cleared. Notice the 30cm of silted up leaf and deadwood “gank”. Notice how water flows through the bottom of that gank? That’s the cause of the upstream bogginess.

It’s just a case of clearing the stuff from the top, breaking up the ground with the mattock, prying out the rocks with the mattock, sawing the roots with the silky, breaking it back up with the mattock and then shovelling out the nutrient dense soily silt and putting it onto the banks where it’s held in place by logs of deadwood. Rinse and repeat.

After three hours I ended up with a nice section of about fifteen metres cleared and flowing nicely. It doesn’t look like much, but when the camera turns around you can get an idea of how much the flow has been improved. What I didn’t manage to capture on camera was the breaking through of a “head” of dammed up water. In some areas the larger rocks, twigs and leaf litter had created damns. When I broke through them, a large volume of water flowed the full width of the channel, and at a nice fast speed.

After four hours I had cleared about twenty five meters of drainage and I’m sure that this approach is going to make a dramatic difference on the drainage of the site. However, I don’t even think this section represents even one percent of the total that I have to do.

The Plan

I knew this would be a long burning exercise spanning at least one year. I suspect that in four hours I managed to do about twenty five metres.

Above you can see the area that I managed to clear in four hours in the pink dotted rectangle. The larger purple shape is what I have to get done before July. I suspect that’ll take twenty - thirty days of digging. This section is the most important because it contains the most water, and thus represents the biggest chance to get the site draining. The large pool of water at left is almost certainly a spring from an old mine shaft (there is a tell tale iron oxide in it) and I suspect this is the biggest cause of downstream bogginess. Here’s a picture of the top of the area that shows some of the tell tale iron oxide.

Here’s a plot twist, everything will will need digging out twice – once upstream and once downstream. What I’ve managed in this first pass is the tiny section of upstream, but as the water starts flowing more and more, it’s going to deposit a lot of silt into the areas that I’ve dug out already, so it’ll need another pass (albeit easier) to remove that silt build up.

As I move upstream I’m removing all the larger stones and putting them to the side on the banks. Once I’m done and all the way to the that pooled area on the left then I’ll start moving downstream clearing out the silt. This is easily done though, as the shovel as it’s nice and light; still though – it’s a pain in the anus.

However, that’s the future. If I’ve learned one thing from tree world it is not to get hung up on the big picture, focus on the next step that moves you closer to the end of your job. So how did I do?

Here’s before…

This is as far upstream as I got. Next time I will work through that holly thicket and up into an area that is very backed up and boggy.

You can see the thicket as the dark hole near the centre of the photo, but by this time I’d drained a lot of water out of this area.

It was very satisfying to see this channel fill up to about 30cm and then drain back down to 10cm when I broke through a head of water. I’d only cleared about twenty five metres, and I have the feeling that once I’ve connected everything up to the large area on the east, this is going to be a nice, seasonal, flowing body of water. Below, you can see border of my area of woodland in the line of tree tubes. It’s flowing nicely now.

The stuff that comes out is actually very high quality soil and nutritionally dense. It may look like slime (and it kind of is), but it is useful and I’m thinking I should probably be doing something a little more productive than throwing it to the sides of the bank. Mixed up 50/50 with decayed birch, it’d make fine potting compost for that future point in which there is actually a dedicated (and deer free) space to manage saplings.

I dug out about five metres into my neighbours property. I was in two minds about this, because obviously that’s not my property, but by the same token I didn’t want to just create a pool of water on the border that didn’t used to be there. About four metres into the neighbouring property there was an area of bog, so I basically connected this channel to that bog. Ideally, the owner should continue the drainage work, but people by these woodland plots for various reasons. Not everyone is interested in restoring their patch of woodland into an optimally productive and ecologically intact area. However, I am. So I dig.

There’s so much to do, but the thing (so I’ve been told) is that semi-ancient woodland doesn’t like sudden changes, so working slowly is fine. Lucky me.

I’ll be continuing this drainage work in the background and I’ll be spending at least one day a week on it every week until I’m at the large area on the east. But there’s also a tonne of other work to be doing, some of which is also digging. Starting with the area at the front of the woodland which I need to upgrade from a single space that fits one car into a full turning circle. Luckily, some of the stone from drainage will come in handy for retaining walls, which I’ll need to manage the left hand of this photo.

Thanks for reading,

I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie

I started off planting full of joy, but by week six and 1100 trees later, the joy had “morphed into slog”. Here’s a photo of roundabout tree 1092 that Mrs Treesandcode took. Yes, it was staged, but I tried to emulate the correct emotion.

But why plant trees in an established woodland…

Don’t trees just grow naturally?

Yes, they do. But it is more complicated than that. England has a deer problem in that population levels are the highest they’ve been for 1000 years. Deers eat (technically called “browsing”) foliage and saplings. In my woodland that means by the time a sapling has sprouted, it has about one month before a deer comes along and munches off the most important part of the sapling - the apical meristem.

If you ever visit my woodland (and I know some of the readers do on an almost daily basis) you’ll notice something that cannot be unseen once you’ve noticed it – there are very few, if any oak trees younger than 20 years. The reason for this is that up until 20 years ago the woodland was managed for deer and was kept stocked with pheasants. Basically, it was a shooters paradise. That meant there was very little deer pressure on natural regeneration and as a result, trees naturally grew.

However that changed when woodlands4sale purchased the site and parcelled it up. Whilst they may have done some management in terms of trees and infrastructure they stopped allowing the local shoots. That meant the deer returned and population levels went through the roof. There is now enough food for deers to eat, but the price is that natural regeneration has ceased and the woodland is technically in decline. Easy fixed, because of the early stages, but decline none the less.

The solution to this decline is that the deer must be managed - and to avoid confusion, by managed I mean killed and butchered. The aim is not to eliminate the population, but rather reduce the population to a level that allows trees to natural regenerate. Deer management is a complex subject and people have varied opinions on it and so in my woodland, it won’t happen any time soon.

So until the deer problem is sorted, that’s why we plant trees and thats why those trees are covered in tree guards.

Coppice & Standards

The Coppice

If you’re not familiar with coppicing you’d be forgiven as it has fallen out of fashion. Until the early 1900’s most of the materials used in any household came from a coppice. In many senses it was the original “Screwfix”. Hazel, willow, alder, ash, oak, sweet chestnut and a few other species can all be used for coppice.

It is making a comeback because it is the only method of silviculture that adds to bio-diversity. The general idea is you plant a tree of a suitable species in my case Hazel (Corylus avellana) and allow it to establish itself to a “young” age. “Young” is a technical tree survey term used in age classification which means “not sapling and has a lot of growth to do before it reaches its maximum height. Hazel should be about 9 - 10 years old. Then, you fell it right at the ground level. Behold my sketch.

It is important to note that most trees species don’t appreciate being felled and for the most part it kills the tree. However coppice species respond with a “can do” attitude and throw out “epicormic shoots” (water sprouts to some folk). The shoots are the product and are called “rods”. Depending on what you want the rods for, you will grow them for a number of years. If you’re using the rods for making weavers or for binders in hedge laying then you’d probably want a 3-4 year “rotation”. When the rods are at the diameter you want, you “coppice” them and the cycle starts all over again.

In coppice land, the stump is referred to as “the stool” and over the course of time, the stools grow in size. Coppicing also dramatically increases the lifespan of the tree. Hazel would normally last for 50-80 years at a push, but when it is coppiced it could easily last upwards of a few hundred. It would be realistic to expect quality harvests from years 15 onwards. You see this extension in life in all coppiced trees. Ash jumps from 300 years as a tree, to 800+ years as a coppice species. It’s an amazing technique and the ultimate in pragmatic sustainability.

But what about the standards?

The standards

A woodland has four layers. The ground (0-10cm), the field (10cm - 2m), the understory (2-7m) and the canopy (7m+). Hazel is an understory species and when in coppice configuration is quite densely packed to ensure rods grow straight, upwards and toward the light.

In a standards with coppice arrangement, the standards are the larger trees that occupy the canopy layer. In my case that’s going to be oak, specifically a mixture of english oak (Quercus robur) and sessile oak (Quercus patraea). A curious point of note here, if you’re familiar with the phrase “keeping up standards” then you may be interested to know that woodland folklore claims this phrase as its own. To “keep up standards” literally refers to the fact that the best examples should be aimed for and left standing - in other words “keeping them up”. I don’t have any evidence of this beyond my original treeschool woodland teacher. It sounds good though, so I’m sharing it. Maybe it’s misinformation?

Wherever the phrase came from, standards are left standing well into maturity and were traditionally felled and sold once in a while. The general idea being that a local carpenter would come along and pay for a standards and leave them standing until he (yes, “he”, because "she” typically wasn’t a carpenter back in the day) was within a few years of needing them. Leaving the tree standing meant that it was also growing, which meant your return on investment was larger.

There are already a few "lovely standards” in my woodland. It is hard to see but the oak in the middle of this photo is an excellent standard. To the point where I’ve established an amenity area around it called “the pavilion”. If you look hard to the centre right you’ll also see the first chunky oak beams that are going to be used to erect “the pavilion” so that I have somewhere dry to work when I’m in the woodland doing forestry work.

The problem however, is that I don’t have enough standards growing. Deer pressure has suppressed natural regeneration for 20 years on the oaks and grey squirrel pressure has limited the ability of the hazelnuts to actually hit the ground in a state ready for germinating. The birch are beginning to fail which leaves open glades like the one above. As I said above, the woodland is in decline.

I need a lot more standards and I need to establish some clear boundaries.

Boundaries

It would be tempting to rush straight in and start planting up hazels in coppice formation and standards every 10 meters, but that would be a folly. For one, the woodland doesn’t have any clear boundaries beyond stakes in the ground that divide the plots up.

This is a concern for a two reasons. Firstly, motorbikes. We get a lot of tresspassing motorbikes coming through the place. I don’t mind the public walking through the place as long as they enter with good intentions and take only photographs. Motorbikes on the other hand just mash the place up. Tracks, saplings, ground flora all get mashed up by the wheels. Secondly, each of us owners have different approaches to management. Some prefer to do nothing and leave their plots to the whims of nature (spoiler: windfallen birch) others (such as me) are seeking to get the woodland into a workable productive silviculture. A boundary makes it clear where one management system starts and where another begins.

So instead of planting up the coppice, I’ve been planting up the tree stock on the boundaries as a hedge. The hazel is 1m apart with oaks every fifteen meters placed 1-3 meters behind the hedge.

I’ll be adding to the hedge every year, next year I’ll beat it up (woodland term for replacing the dead trees) and thicken it with hawthorn and blackthorn. Nasty pointy thorns are an excellent natural repellent for motorised trespassers and do a great job of keeping people in certain places. After ten years or so it should be ready to be laid and fortunately for me, the required hazel stock for stakes and binders can be sourced from my own resources.

I’m aiming for something like this - to be clear - this is a random hedge off the internet. I didn’t do it, I don’t own it and it isn’t in the woodland. But it is lovely.

Planting

It has taken a while to get these trees in the ground (and I still have 60 or so left to do). Often I’m working alone and isn’t like the planting I’ve done before at The Estate. Here I have to manually carry the trees through a woodland (slow), knock the supports in about 20cm, pop a rabbit tube on the cane and then lay out trees on each. Then I walk back to the start of my line (which could be 20 or 180 trees) and then make a hole, insert the tree, carefully put the tree guard over the tree, making sure not to strip the buds off with the tube edge and then finally whack the stake level with the top of the guard. Here’s a video of me doing two trees. For context, working alone I was able to get 180 done in about six hours.

I’ve hit my hand more times than I care to imagine with the mallet. There’s been a permanent yellow bruise there for weeks now. You may be curious to know why everything I have is on a harness connected with lanyards. It makes it easier to drop tools and pick them up again. Easy. It’s not a rig I’ve used anywhere else, but it works for me.

I do miss using a proper tree planting harness and I may adapt mine for next year so that I can carry stakes, tubes and plants. If you’re curious about what a standard tree planting harness looks like, check the below pictures This one was from my time at The Estate back in November of 2022. The harness is basically two big heavy duty bags that hang from the hips that you fill with trees.

My rig is more practical in that I have the spade and all my tools. But next year, I’m going to pimp it to hold trees, stakes and tubes.

If you were wondering, this is what a pack of ten oaks looks like. I have six packs of 10 left. Mrs Treesandcode will be pleased to once again have a clear front of house. “Pallet full of trees chic” isn’t going to catch on as this seasons must-have home decor.

Rabbit Tubes?

The elephant in the room. I got these trees for free from Carbon Footprint. They are one of those companies that does carbon offsetting in the form of “your companies carbon footprint is X, therefor you need to plant Z trees”. Had I paid for these trees, I would have paid about £1000~ for the trees. Ideally I would have received oak stakes and 1.2m deer tubes. This would have put the total up by £2500~. Rabbit tubes with canes however, probably put the total up by £1000. Can you figure out why I was supplied with rabbit tubes rather than deer tubes? I’m not looking a gifthorse in the mouth however, and I am very grateful for the trees. Especially since we got cells (more expensive, heavier to transport, more likely to survive planting) and not bare root (cheaper, lighter and less likely to survive planting).

Luckily for now, the trees are small and thus protected by the 60cm rabbit tubes, but as soon as the trees grow beyond the top of the tube, the deer will browse them. So what I am going to do to stop the deer. Well first I’m going to treat them with Trico Deer Repellant. I’ve heard good things about it, and it’s based on lamb fat - which deers hate. I’ll be using this on all of the hazel. As for the oaks - I have managed to liberate a few hundred 1.2m deer tubes but I don’t have any stakes. Whilst hazel isn’t known for its longevity when used as a post, I have lots of overstood hazel that needs to be used for something. My current plan is to cut up the large stems of overstood hazel into 1.8m lengths and rive them into stakes, use an axe to point the ends and “whack em in the ground”. I’ve certainly got enough to get this done.

Next time though, I’ll make sure to get the deer tubes. Re-tubing 300 oaks is a pain in the anus.

Long Road

There’s a long road between this years planting and having the woodland up and running as a functioning coppice with standards. However, the reality is that this is treeworld and things are slow. I’m nearly fifty and even if I live until I’m hundred and able to get into the woodland (life goals) any oaks I plant this year will still be considered “early mature”. Hell, they won’t even produce acorns until I’m between 70 & 80.

But they say “the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago and the next best time is today”. That’s what I’ve been doing. Starting the slow process of returning this woodland into a state which will give me a sustainable source of hazel and oak from which to work with. No rush. Years matter in treeworld, milliseconds matter in techworld. However, no matter how much code you write, nothing, and I mean nothing comes close to pulling a drawknife over green timber and shaping your own harvested stuff into a thing.

In terms of the woodland and the jobs I’m tackling, I’m torn between fixing drainage or securing the perimeter from motorbikes with dead hedges. They’ve been getting in the front through the stone path I laid down, so I installed a woodland gate.

That’s the thing with a woodland, there is an endless list of things to do. Even if you turn up with a plan, the woodland has a schedule all of its own. I think the drainage is going to win.

I have no idea what I’ll do next, but I know I’ve still got 60 oaks left to go.

Alright, that’s a wrap. Thanks for reading.

I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie.

As always, there’s a reason I’ve not posted much recently. This time though it’s different (yeah, righto, mr-never-posts). I’ve been busy making more changes in my life to bring it into a configuration that better matches what I want to be doing with my (limited and unknown quantity) time on this planet.

When I set out on this little journey of mine, I called it “Life of Treedom”. The story was that I’d leave one career behind and start a new one. That kind of happened and kinda didn’t. I really wanted it to work and I almost convinced myself, but this post is the story of the “kinda didn’t” that concludes with a “what next”.

The Kinda Didn’t

Treeschool

I took a job at treeschool teaching trees and woodland management in August of 2024. This was meant to be the main income into my household whilst I did treework on weekends. I have much to say about education systems and in a later post I absolutely will. However, the relevance to this post is that my grand idea of “teach during the week” and “work during the weekends” didn’t really work out – at all. I didn’t expect that especially since my colleagues who I work with have that mixture down to a fine art.

The answer lies in what I teach and what they teach.

I teach theory and I have a classroom in which to carry out my work. My colleagues teach practical and they go outside to work. When working, I’m in a room looking at trees, talking about trees and mostly wishing I was outside amongst the trees. Sometimes I run the classes outside, but describing topics such as the cellular structure of wood cells (lamella, s1, s2, s3 and middle lamella) without a whiteboard or screen results in blank stares, many questions, little understanding and a waste of precious contact time.

My colleagues get to do treework on weekends because a) they don’t have to prepare anything outside of hours for practical and b) they’ve been doing it for years. However, when I’m putting together a three hour theory lesson (with breaks – obviously) I spend about nine to sixteen hours of planning. That’s basically somewhere between three and four times the length of the lesson. I teach 18 hours a week out of a 38 hour contract. That sounds reasonable, but it was taking between 54 and 90 hours of planning per week. This is before I get to any of the admin work (about 5-10 hours depending on the whims of my bureaucratic overlords) and certainly before any of the 18 hours of teaching are accounted for.

Egads. I knew it would be a slog preparing material, but I didn’t know it would be this bad. Mrs Treesandcode warned me. I didn’t listen and I didn’t expect how colossal an undertaking content creation would be for a teacher.

This is what the first year is like for all teachers. In the second year the preparation work dies down, and by the third year all of the materials are there, so you are basically in a nice loop. However, in order to get to that third year I would have to do nothing else other than treeschool. No treework and thus no business growth.

Long week. No life. Rising anger levels. If life was a game of chess, treeschool just declared check on me.

I didn’t expect that. This is the biggest kinda didn’t.

Software & Code

I did not expect to be enjoying writing software so much again. I thought that me and software were done, but it turns out that I just needed a nice long break from doing it.

Another “another” topic I’ll write about later, but I suspect my change in career had more to do with being burned out from being in an executive role. I can do it that kind of role, but I don’t “enjoy it”. There’s not a lot of writing code in that role (there’s some but not a lot) and I was well away from “the coal face”. Whilst tech work doesn’t make hard calloused hands, there’s definitely a production culture. I think that’s what I was seeking in treeworld.

Most of you will not have heard of Github, so I’ll describe it as a place where code lives and the place where you can collaborate on source code (open or closed source). I’ve been using Github since 2008, though most of the code from that time has been removed. One thing that Github has is a feature where it shows various charts of your activity. Here is an image that I put together from that feature that shows my activity from 2021 to 2025. Can you see where I lost total connection to the production culture in my role? (mid 2021). You can definitely see where I reached “peak treeworld” (Sep 2023 - Dec 2024).

More importantly, can you see where the interest returned in 2025?

It’s not something I’ve written about much because it was never relevant but behind the scenes here, there’s been a monthly income from technology work (the shame). Whether it be odds bits of software here and there or the mundane-to-some-but-not-for-me data protection work that I’ve been doing, it’s always been there lurking in the background. Fundamentally, it’s been keeping the lights on in the business since it started. I figured it would gradually fade away as tree work took over, but it hasn’t - it has come to front. I didn’t expect that.

So if treeschool is killing my time, preventing me from doing treework and I’m enjoying writing code again, what should a man do?

The What Next?

Goodbye Treeschool

I’m constantly assessing what’s the best way forward. There’s no science to it – I just use my gut. When The Estate wasn’t working out, I had a spidey sense it was time to move forward. After Christmas I had a giant spidey sense that Treeschool wasn’t going to work out either. So I resigned.

Leaving Treeschool is harder than the estate because you’re the teacher for a bunch of people who are headed to exams and formal work. Technically I could have left two weeks after I resigned (early January) but I figured the best (and most honourable) time to leave was after the first year and second years had completed their exams.. So basically I’ve been wanting to post this substack since January 9th (the day I resigned), but some of my students read this (hello, greetings). I certainly didn’t want them to find out about my exit from their student universe via an email from substack. That’s not classy. I also knew how it feels when teachers leave.

Out of the five teachers I had at treeschool whilst I was a student, three of them left in the middle of a term before exams1. Whilst that sucked massively, I have always been able to self-study and lead so to me it wasn’t a big deal. However, it did create some issues in the classroom dynamics which I picked up the slack on. I organised us, I prepared unit specifications and did the best I could to ensure our new teachers found it easy to pick up the slack. However, there was some turbulance and I didn’t want to create that bumpy journey for my students before their exams. With the exception of t-level2 students (who will be fine as I’ve given them a plan, even if they don’t know it), all of the other students have their exams on Monday 3rd and Tuesday the 4th of March, so I leave on March the 14th.

Life is short, I’m nearing fifty and the impact of treeschool on my life is the exact opposite of what I had intended it to be.

I was aiming for more money, more time.

What I got was more time, less money.

Nope. Do not want.

Hello Software

This next part is so bizarre to me that I don’t quite know how to write it, so I will just say it.

I’m applying for full time software jobs again. Not executive and not leadership - writing and authoring on the production coalface. I’d go as far as senior roles, but I’m interested in production culture and mentality. Ideally remote and preferably four days a week. I don’t imagine I’ll get that right out the gate, but it’s possible over time.

My logic is that if I’m going to sit in a room and look at trees, that room may as well be in my own house, the whiteboard may as well be the one behind me and I may as well travel as little as possible. The bonus with software jobs is that I don’t have to do any preparation work in my own time in order to do the job (except maybe thinking about puzzles, but that’s fine because it is fun).

I can hear you all asking…

hold on you wassock, you left a job in tech only to have a three year break, fanny about with trees only to return to a job in tech?

Yes, that’s exactly correct. Well done you for figuring it out. You’re so clever.

If you’re thinking that is the end of the road for me and trees you are wrong. It is just the end of the beginning – “the intro credits”.

The real story starts now.

Trees & Code.

Explaining my previous career to people in treeworld is hard. If I do a good enough job of it I can get people to understand it enough so that they say something like “ah, you write code”. If I majestically screw it up, they respond with ”I.T. then, computers and stuff?” I stopped correcting people if they said “I.T.”, but I always walked away happy if they understood enough to say code. Whenever I’ve met with people from my previous world, they always ask how “I’m enjoying the trees” or if ”I’m still doing the trees”. I don’t correct them to tree surgeon or arborist or mention forestry or woodland management. Trees is good enough.

So if treeworld sees my cyberspace world as “code” and techworld world sees my meatspace world as “trees” then there’s only one thing to do - embrace it. To that end, the name of this substack is going to change from Life of Treedom to “Trees & Code”. I’ll make that change by the time you read this and I’ll clean up the mentions of Life of Treedom as I go. The logo will need some adjusting but that’s fine. This isn’t a race. Oak doesn’t race birch.

As far as content goes, I’m going to start posting about the software stuff that I do. I know this may alienate a few readers, I’d be sorry to see anyone leave because of that, but such is life when you’re operating in a niche universe of trees and code. Remember, writing code is just a tool just like a chainsaw is a tool. Ideally I’d like to show a few of you how accessible writing software is - especially in Python.

My apologies in advance if the tech stuff turns you off.

“Sorry not sorry” kind of thing.

Online Courses

In 2013, after I had completed my teaching qualifications, I had a hypothesis based on the experience of others and some light experience of my own –

If you want to help people learn in the modern world, you need to get as far away from the education system as you as you can.

After six months working in the modern education sector I’m pretty sure I was onto something twelve years ago. I thought treeschool was different and to be honest, but now that I’ve peeked behind the curtain, I can see that it isn’t.

However, I still want to help people learn about trees, their habitats and how to manage them in urban and woodland settings. So I’m going to take some time to adjust, twist, finish and polish up the content I prepared for treeschool (in my own hours on my own machines – that’s important to note). When I’m done, you can expect to see me release onto teachable (or maybe somewhere else, but probably teachable) a series of courses related to trees:

1. Basics of Tree Identification

2. Basics of Tree & Plant Science

3. Basics of Tree survey and Inspection

4. Basics of Urban Tree Health & Management

5. Basics of Woodland Health & Management

Being free of the demands of a weekly teaching schedule allows me to go back into my own materials and finish to a way that I’m happy with. No classroom deadlines to hit, no corners to cut. I’m keeping the topics focused on the basics because foundations are much easier to communicate in a one to many style of learning. Once you start getting into intermediate levels you get into the realm of in-person courses where dialogue can be had and they really need to be done in person. Which leads nicely onto…

The Woodland

I have a woodland. It’s a lovely woodland.

Last year it was heavily neglected for reasons mentioned above (the estate, treeschool) However, this year I’ve rectified that error. I think I lost sight of the woodland and the role it plays in this new universe of mine. I was so busy being swept up domestic arb work and teaching that I forgot about it. However, I have rectified this mistake and I’ve been there more in the last week than I have in entire of last year.

So far I’ve planted many trees (1200 - 900 hazel / 300 oaks) and the hazels especially have been used to start off hedges that will inform the location of rides as well as boundaries between “out of bounds” ecology / copse areas, and “feel free to walk around” rides (woodland pathways). It also gives me a great excuse to practice hedge laying which is a discipline I fully intend on getting into. I have this goal of teaching meditation and being a hedge layer when I’m in my 80’s. I digress.

There’s a lot to do in this woodland and it’s all interesting. A lot more interesting than domestic arb work (have hedge, trim hedge, have tree, remove tree, big tree made into small tree etc etc). The things you need to do in a woodland are not just concerned with trees. I’m not knocking domestic arb work, it is a bread and butter income stream, but woodlands are more interesting. It’s like domestic arb on steroids.

Over this next year, I want to complete the formal woodland management plan and get that submitted to the forestry commission. Once I have the plan, I can get a felling license. Once I have the felling license I can get to work restoring the old hazel coppice with oak standards. Ten years after that work is completed, the woodland will have it’s own predictable income from the sale of hazel as a raw material, or goods produced by yours truely.

There’s a lot of infrastructure work to do. When we took over the woodland there were few if any clear paths (called rides in woodland world) to get around the place. To get down into the woodland from the parking space you had to slide / run down a mud bank. That bank is now a set of usable stairs and it’s hard to say what a difference such small things make.

There’s rides to put in place so that I have a space to drive a quad bike, small tractor or small digger. At first these will be made of wood chip (because I have a chipper) but once we have the management plan we’ll be able to apply for grants to install proper stone rides suitable for light timber extraction. Then there’s the water…

The hydrology needs to be sorted. Nearly all of the drainage channels are heavily silted up and that’s causing some upstream bogginess. Here you can see what a few minutes of work with a planting spade looks like. I was excited to see the water flowing again. Of course this will block up again in a few weeks, but it was enough to show me that I can get the water to move around the site again.

To do the hydrology properly we’re going to have to dig out the channels fully, re-locate the silt and that’s all going to have to be by hand. Yes, yes I know, “hire a digger”, but that’s an over simplification. I’ve got nothing to tow a digger to the woodland with (I sold the truck), there’s no way to get into the woodland without tearing the place up (I don’t want to tear the place up) and also - I’m not that good with a digger. So whilst I know (and agree) with the idea that a digger would be faster and better, for now that is not an option. One day it will be, but that day is not today.

As we dig it out by hand, I’m going to install drainage pipe wrapped in membrane to somewhat future proof the drainage. I’d like to do a proper job of it with gravel, but it is too much faff without machinery. There’s no way I’m carrying 150 bags of 25kg gravel deep into a woodland. Nope. That’s a job for when there’s proper rides and I can do it with a tractor or an ATV of some kind. Doing them by hand with pipe and membrane should give me a good five years of reasonably good drainage.

Tree Software - Dendromeda

Enough of the trees – what about the code!

Work continues on dendromeda, though it has been sharing my time with refreshing my technical skill set and learn a few tricks and languages. However, I’m still bullish on getting this app built and deployed. Truth be told, the break from authoring it has allowed me to focus the functionality. I’m going to build it around the idea of a very good, very easy, as accurate as I can make it application for tree surveys, inspections and allowing the public to report issues with trees in a “dendromeda managed area”. It’s also going to realistically priced so that the average user doesn’t need to commit thousands of pounds to use it.

It’d be nice to get it generating a little income and I’m sure you’d like to see how such a thing is done. So I’m going to write about that. It’s going to be a nice tool to use in my own woodland to demonstrate that the trees are regularly inspected, and to provide a means of the public reporting any issues with any trees. In software land they call this use of using your own software as if you were your own customer “dogfooding”.

“These trees are managed by Dendromeda”.

It has a nice ring to it.

Wrapping Up

So yes, my universe shifted again but I think it’s now pointed at something I was always headed for. A focus on tree work where I can learn and share whilst at the same time using my technology skills that I’ve spent a fifth of century developing. A blend of cyberspace and meatspace. Blue collar hands and a white collar mind. You get the idea.

Someone a lot wiser than me said that the best software people are the ones with a second profession. The doctor that writes code for example, will write better medical software than a doctor would who guided a software developer. The farmer who writes code will write better agricultural software than a farmer and a software developer. The software guy who understands tree populations etc etc.

It now feels like I’ve come full circle. I was Gandalf the grey and now I am Gandalf the white. I fell into shadow, but I’ve returned. Different, but the same. New purpose new goals. Basically - Trees & Code. A dual career of sorts.

Did I succeed in replacing the day job? Not yet, but then again I think the reality is that I’ll always have a job as an employee. They pay well and that money can be used to buy nice things like diggers, ATV’s, stone, gravel, trees, bandsaw mills and all of the other stuff that you need to restore a woodland and do tree work.

Maybe one day I’ll make enough of my own steam, but that day is not today and I’m comfortable with that because now I’ve got an outlet to my day job - trees. I didn’t have that before and now I’ve also got an appreciation for being in the production culture - where the rubber hits the road. Fair enough, techworld is more comfortable and you don’t risk death when you’re working, but then again treeworld doesn’t pay that well in comparison and it’s brutal on the body. The smart man balances these two things out. And in the end that’s all I’m trying to do, balance the books and balance my life.

Life of Treedom felt like birch, a race for competitive advantage, a hatred of shade and demands for full light - a pioneer species. Trees and Code feels like oak. In no hurry, can tolerate shade whilst young and in it for the long run - a climax species.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie.

Years Ago

From about 2008 until 2015 I routinely used to get up at 5:00 am and write code until 7:30. Mrs Treedom was always asleep and didn’t wake up until 7:30 at which point the morning routine started. At some point in 2015 I decided that 5am was too early and that I needed sleep. We all need sleep and I find that the easiest way for me to start packing on the pounds of adipose tissue is to not get enough sleep. So I changed the story. I was no longer a person that got up at 5am.

Instead, I always had a period of 20 - 60 minutes before bed where I sat and wrote code. I did this because I found the act of writing code extremely fulfilling when it deployed and you could interact with it. I remember the first time I authored code (perl if you’re wondering) and deployed it back in 1998 – I thought it was magical. It remained magical even when I knew exactly what it was doing. Code is magical and I loved writing it, that was the story.

Sometime around 2019 I started to feel less enthusiastic about writing code. I wasn’t like other programmers / developers. I didn’t enjoy learning new languages (more story). There was something else though, I couldn’t name it at the time so I recognised it as a yearning to escape the technology industry. So I wrote less code and by 2023 after all contractual obligations to write code had been fulfilled, I wrote no code.

A Break

The first few years of teaching is known to be insane. I have certainly experienced that in my first few months at treeschool. Up till 2am and back up at 6:30am on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday is pretty much the norm. I have been doing the odd tree job here and there, but even the weekends were getting absorbed by lesson preparation.

I had not been to the woodland in months, I was physically exhausted, and because I was getting no sleep, having a questionable diet and spending 2-3 hours a day driving I was packing on the beef again (and I prefer to be lean, not chunky). A lack of physical work since leaving the estate was not helping matters either. So the plan was to get into the woodland get some hard work done over the Christmas period. But the weather scuppered me on all fronts.

So I slept a lot. I actually rested. I also ate a tonne, which didn’t help the body composition, but meh whatever - it’s Christmas. But the point was that for the first time in a long time I felt utterly relaxed.

I didn’t expect this …

Being relaxed, at home all warm and rested I was at my computer doing some stuff and I had a moment of inspiration that I’d not had in a long time. I almost didn’t recognise it. My story was that I’d left a career in tech so at first I didn’t recognise the feeling. When I used to get up at 5am to write code back in the day, there was a feeling I’d get. Anyone who has a thing they do, that they enjoy, will know what I’m talking about. It’s somewhere between compulsion, addiction, thirst and enthusiasm. So there I was all nice and relaxed just fiddling with words and topics when it hit me.

I wanted to build a god damn app.

cd ~/git/
mkdir dendromeda # ok, this step took me an hour, naming things is HARD
cd de<tab>
git init .

The app is called Dendromeda. Dendron being greek for trees and the ending of “meda” making it sound like a universe. Universe of trees. Also the dotcom was available.

When two worlds collide…

I’ve been keeping my eyes open in treeworld and watching the technology space. Compared to the whizzy, sleek and well executed world I came from, you could describe treeworld tech as expensive (£5000 a year subscription fees are standard), a bit crusty in the ui (jQuery UI)or locked behind a sales cycle (definite audience decision). Some tech is very nice and very focused but for the most part everything is some kind of geographic information system (GIS) with a UI designed to allow you to place points where the trees go.

I don’t want to get into the features of what the app will do, as that’s a slow burning road with my main goals to get 1 paying customer and then 10. There’s at least three or four avenues to explore in terms to get to those customers. I won’t know that my hunch is correct until I get solid feedback and repeat billing but that’s part of the process. I know that metaphorically and scientifically that mighty oaks grow from tiny acorns. Trees produce multiple seeds because it’s a numbers game so I’m aimed at four audiences.

1. Arboriculture consultants who perform inspections and surveys for health or BS5837 surveys.

2. Arboriculture businesses who sell commercial or domestic tree services.

3. Woodland owners who need to stay on top of hazard trees on public highways.

4. Homeowners who own trees in gardens that interact with public highways.

Which broadly translates into three areas of exploration.

1. Tree Inspections and Surveys

2. Arb Job Management

3. Risk & Liability Management

With a few asterix inserted here and there, my professional arb adventures cover all of the above, so that means I get to actually use this app in anger whilst out there doing my work. Having also came from a world where an idea, some drive and team of less than three grew to a large multinational many millions in revenue, I have some nice prior experience to draw from and hopefully a few contacts!

Was I just burned out?…

Dendromeda is being worked on in my spare time and it has given me a totally new and fresh wind of enthusiasm for designing, developing and deploying tech. I’ve been sitting on these feelings of ethusiasm for a week whilst I was on holiday from treeschool. They’ve grown, which hasn’t happened since the a period from about 2013 - 2018. The last time I had this intensity of motivation was when I was in early doors at SoPost and we were building that.

If I think back to my escape from tech and into the woods I can see it more clearly as burnout. In fact it is so obvious that I don’t know how I missed it. I had declared “burnout” to my gaffer back in 2020, but I am not sure I understand it now as I did then. It’s a moot point though because whatever path I’m on feels right. To be back writing tech and to be qualified arborist and a teacher feels kind of amazing. Except the lesson planning bit – let it be known just how hard a slog it is being an FE teacher, but that’s another topic. Let us also not mention FE (and all) teachers salary, which is a novel of misery and malice rather than a topic.

However, now I find myself technologically refreshed and technically and professionally competent in a new industry. Fun times are ahead but for now, the writing of code has opened my eyes a to the future where I’m doing tech and trees. Trees and code. Who-da-thunkit.

I didn’t expect a fairytale story. They never happen and that’s why they are a fairy tale. Real life stories are typically plot twists where the authors themselves have no idea about what’s next and that’s certainly the case for this author. I guess the “left a twenty year career in tech” of the story now needs a question mark and relegation to a chapter. I now know longer no what the title of the story is, but it’s clear that I’m writing code and brushing off my programmer skills and putting them firmly back into production in treeworld.

I am super motivated in a way that I’ve not had for years. Teeming with excitement.

I appreciate your attention.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Jamie.

p.s. The logo is diabolically bad but that’s by design. The logo for the app is last of things I’ll look at. It is good enough for now and if you know me, you’ll understand how much personal growth it required to do that. Secondary growth, that’s a tree thing and a me thing.

I was always inspired by Carl Sagans recipe for apple pie, specifically the initial step – “first, create the universe". It makes the whole existence of everything seem so blasé. However, Mr Sagan missed out one salient point. Yes, creating the universe is the first step and we can assume that included the Earth, but he missed out the part of the recipe where we had soil. Without ecological succession there’s no soil and that means no plant life and that means no trees and that means no apple and that means no apple pie.

Then I looked at my Christmas tree and saw an opportunity to solve three pressing issues. First, post something. My writing over the last few months has been strictly limited to writing lesson resources at treeschool and I have a certain amount of “content guilt” to assuage. Secondly, wish everyone a merry Christmas because it’s Christmas tomorrow and thirdly write something about ecological succession because despite being told by everyone around me at treeschool to switch off for Christmas and relax, when something needs to be authored, then something needs to be authored.

Ecological Succession

Ecological succession (herein called succession) refers to the impact of time on a given habitat where pioneer species establish with minimal diversity themselves only to be eventually usurped by climax species with maximal diversity. There’s two currently accepted flavours of succession and they are primary and secondary. Primary succession is the name given to the process when there is no soil present at the start of the process. The two most common situations for this are when a glacier melts (such as what happened in Europe about 14,000 years ago) or when a volcano erupts and creates a new layer of fresh volcanic rock. Secondary succession is what happens when the soil layer is already present. Common scenarios for secondary succession include fire, flooding and at a push you could even probably claim that that clearfelling a large area with heavy forestry machinery would qualify.

I’m talking about primary succession, so let’s hop in a time machine and deposit ourselves into northern England around about 12,000 bc. Forgive the AI generated images – drawing these scenes is hard and we didn’t have humans with cameras 14,000 years ago.

The Ice Melted

Pay attention to the layout of the land. The hard dramatic geometry of the valley sides where abiotic factors such as wind, rain, frost and lightning have yet to soften the angular primitive geometry. It’s harsher than the wacky fast techno I hear youths playing in their overly expensive insured cars.

We see clusters of rocks and boulders and these are important primitives in the primary succession process. But there is no soil. Yes, there are some straggly plant looking things, but let’s ignore them because I couldn’t get AI to not include them.

No soil – side-quest time1…

Soil

Rarely, if ever, do you consider the origins of soil. It is one of those things that are “just there”. Mr Sagan certainly assumed soil would be present. The thing is though, soil doesn’t just happen. Soil is made and like everything that is made it has a process. From a natural origins perspective, the soils that make up our ancient woodlands are thousands of years old and (assuming human industrial interventions are positive) they really will get better with time. But what is soil I hear you ask?

There are two categories of material that constitute soil. Inorganic material and organic material. At a simplistic level inorganic translates into sand, clay and silt. Organic material refers to dead plant tissue, bacteria as well as the invertebrate population which are called “detritivores". Layers of soil are called horizons but you don’t get horizons straight away. They take hundreds perhaps thousands of years to appear. We’re jumping ahead by talking about horizons though. Because we don’t even have soil yet.

Where does the soil come from?

Rock

Sand, clay and silt all come from the breakdown of rock over the course of time. Now I could take a massive side-quest into the composition of rocks and how rocks “flow” but I want to finish this post before Christmas and so I’ll simply state that rocks are made of minerals (quartz, feldspar), mineraloids (jet, amber, pumice, obsidian) and organic matter (coal, peat). I may be insulting geologists, but I’d describe a rock as a detached section of earths crust. The exact composition of any given rock depends on the section of crust from which it ultimately detached.

But how does the rock get broken down?

Let us start off with this rock. It looks like it was formed with gas bubbles in it, but as you can see there’s just the rock. There’s no algae, lichen, moss or liverworts living on or next to it. It is just the rock. Let’s fix that.

Pioneer species of algae, lichen, mosses and liverworts take up residence on the rocks and secrete enzymes that speed up the breakdown of rock into small particles that are carried off by the wind, washed off by the rain or just fall because of gravity. We can note that the rock is less pitted because it is being smoothed by the action of organic population on the rock surface.

But what about the weather how does that play a role?

Over time as the rain freezes and thaws on the rock, tiny cracks will start to form. As the sun heats the rock and as time passes this combined weathering action expand the cracks. This expansion will eventually cause sections of rock to break off and become smaller rocks. In our example we can see that our rock is smoothing out and the resulting sand, silt and clay has fallen to the ground to give habitat to a pioneering mosses and primitive non-vascular plants. We’re a long way from Christmas trees though.

As the rocks split and surface area for organisms expands, the populations of bryophytes (non-vascular plants such as mosses and liverworts) and tracheophytes (vascular plants such as grasses and flowers) grow and the entire process accelerates. Our once lonely rock is now smaller, massively fragmented, weathered and sitting in a at least an inch or two of primitive, low quality, but viable-at-a-push-soil. The organic materials of the new soil are provided by the decaying of the dead pioneering organisms which are being recycled back into nutrients thanks to mites, springtails and beetle populations.

And that ladies and gentlemen, is both how we come to have soil and also the end of the side-quest.

We Have Soil (kinda)

At last we have soil and we can see that we have a the basics of a ground layer forming in the landscape. We can also note the hard geometry of steep valleys is being softened into a something less described as a cliff face and more fitting in with a “challenging hill”. But we still have no trees or plants.

All is not lost though because even though the soil is thin and primitive, it is definately soil. It is also becoming increasingly fertile and likely heading towards being “a good loam”. A quality general purpose soil is often referred to as a “loam” and in a basic sense “loam” means equal parts sand, silt and clay with a smattering of organic matter for water retention and nutrient availability.

As time passes, the winds blow and the ever warming climate becomes hospitable to birds that carry seed, we begin to see the first glimpse of a woodland starting to appear.

If I was being pushed to give some kind of time reference here, I’d say we are now at about 9000bc-Ish. Give or take a Millennium or two.

Wind Pollinators

After the ice sheets melted and glaciers retreated, it was still pretty cold. This made for a poor home for insect pollinators, so they were few and far between in northern England. For comparison, just have a think how many bees and wasps you see kicking around on a frosty January afternoon? Sure, we have some birds kicking around during the winter months, and there’s certainly insects at the ground level, but not so much of the airborne pollinating insects.

In our landscape, we can note a few distinct changes happening. We now have the first signs of a woodland layers being established. We have the ground layer (everything generally below 10cm including the soil) and the beginnings of the field layer (10cm –1m), which will eventually grow to become the shrub layer (1m - 5m) and finally we will get the canopy layer (everything over 5m). Small beginnings though, because we’re just seeing the first examples of Betula nana and Pinus sylvestris (scots pine is the common name in UK, but it is also known as Norway pine if you’re from that neck of woods) saplings establishing themselves. Both of these species are wind pollinated and can tolerate poor quality (in relative terms) soils.

One particular thing about Birch (Betula) is that the genera are short lived with bark that is very waterproof. Birch is a short lived pioneer species that will grow in pretty much any soil. It has a maximum lifespan of about 80-100 years. Typically life is a lot shorter for birches and about 20-50 is more probable. They have a very close relationship with two decay fungi - Fomitopsis betulina and Fomes fomentarius. When a birch tree reaches a certain point in its life it will likely succumb to rapid colonisation by one of these two fungi. Because birch bark is waterproof (birch bark is used in many cultures for canoe making for exactly this reason) all of the moisture remains in the tree stem after it falls and it is prevented from drying out. The wet environment of the dead stem is perfect habitat for rapid fungal decay of the internal wood (a.k.a. xylem tissue) (cellulose and lignin). In a matter of years, the once solid woody tree is rapidly transformed into a delightful soft damp habitat for detritivores. They convert the once strong upright tree into a very high quality organic mulch for the soil.

The soil quality improves, which opens up the area for more species, which improves the soil. Nature has created a positive feedback loop.

Pioneer Species

This positive feedback loop means that the soils get better and the presence of local pioneering tree species kicks off a cycle of natural regeneration and expansion of the tree population further north into the now hospitable land. Let us not forget that we have only really came about four to six thousand years from the ice sheets melting and glaciers retreating. We’re still not quite at the point we have mesolithic communities doing their hunter gatherer thing yet en masse, but we’re not far off.

In terms of our landscape we have hardly any hard geology based geometry left and the hills are now a rolling cascade of mostly fertile soils. We have ground, field, shrub and canopy species. To all intents and purposes, you could have probably felled one of the scots pine and took it home as your Christmas tree. However, you’d need to wait a good seven or so thousand years for a chainsaw and a truck. The crude oil was ready though.

In our landscape we can see that we now have a vibrant and healthy population of tree species with the best of both worlds. The birch enhances the quality of the soil and is short lived, where as the scots pine is longer lived and provides stable year round habitat for species returning to the once frozen lands.

Before the ice age covered northern England and Scotland in ice, there was an abundance of species from all parts of the animal and plant kingdoms. In fact, most of what is present throughout the warm central parts of Europe would have likely been present in England and Scotland with the exception of the northern most boreal forests. When the ice age started, the species retreated back to warmer climates. This technical term for this retreat is called “refugia”. So when the tree species started to return they were described as returning from refugia.

If you’re particularly savvy you may be thinking, how did the trees cross the English channel? This is a good question. There was technically no “England” in any sense of the word at this point in time. Below is a map of Europe that covers the very early Mesolithic period of about 8000bc. On a modern map, Doggerland features where you’d expect the North Sea and the English channel is nowhere to be seen.

The commonly accepted explanation of the creation of the English channel is a mixture of fresh water run off created by climate change and a series of massive landslides originating off the coast of Norway referred to as the “Storegga Slide”. The slides are thought to have created tsunamis which flooded Doggerland. As Doggerland flooded, it sank and continued sinking until England separated from Europe creating the English Channel.

In arboricultural and silvicultural terms, whatever tree species (33 of them) had made it back from refugia when the English channel was fully formed about (7-6000 years ago) are now considered to be British Natives.

But what about our landscape and our little AI generated landscape?

Climax Species

We started off with a barren tundra with no soil. We then looked at the process of how soil is created by looking at a single rock decay into soil and how species of bryophytes and tracheophytes took up residence in the freshly created habitat. We then watched as the field layer came into existence from the ground layer and then how the pioneer tree species brought about the shrub layer and the canopy layer. It is now nearly time to finish off this journey into how we came to have soil for our Christmas trees. If you want a time frame of reference for this image then let us go with about 1700ad on the grounds that there’s an abundance of grazing land in the background.

Our landscape has once again changed. For some reason the AI has decided to shift the camera angle and we’re now up on the hill as opposed to being in the valley, but more importantly we can see a shift in species. Where there was once birch and Scots pine populations, we now have oak and hazel populations. We still have our rocks doing their slow soil creation, but we also abundant ground, field, shrub and canopy layers. The main point here is that where we once had a few select pioneer species, we now have a broad range of climax species and are approaching a concrete example of maximal diversity in a very strict ecological sense.

Climax species are typically much longer lived than pioneer species. Common oak (Quercus robur) can live for up to one thousand years given the right conditions. This is ten times more than an ideal birch tree can live for. But you cannot start off with climax species, there’s an order of things that has to happen. You need the climate, you need the soil, you need the pollinators and you need the ecosystem. This is less about planting an oak tree in year one and expecting a woodland in year twenty. This is more about allowing an environment to naturally create itself from year one and expecting an oak tree somewhere between year seven hundred and one and half thousand.

Below is a photo of an upload oak woodland in Northern England called Jonnys Wood. The AI was pretty bang on the money. I think this woodland may be one of the few remnants of truly ancient woodland left in England.

Wrapping Up

Given the Christmas eve context, let’s wrap this up. The Christmas tree that you have in your house whether it is real or fake (ours is fake, and it’s a fake birch tree at that) is a complex plant that comes from a particularly complex series of requirements. Even to get to the point where there was soil for it, likely took about a thousand years before it could support trees.

So when Carl Sagan said, “First, create the universe”, he was correct but he missed out the one and half thousand years or so that it would take to get the apple tree to give us fruit. To go from the bit where there is no soil, to the bit where there is soil, to the bit where the pioneer species have come and gone and left us the majestic climax community is called primary succession. All plant life as we know it on Earth, depends on that process as it gives rise to the soil which then gives rise to everything else that grows from it. Which is arguably, everything that you can currently smell, see, touch, feel and more relevantly given the time of year - eat.

So when you’re looking at your Christmas tree this year, think on that. One and a half thousand years. That’s a long time.

Almost as much time as it takes me to write posts these days.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate your attention.

Merry Christmas,

Cheers,

Jamie.

Long version

I initially set out on a journey that I thought would leave me with a tree business as my full-time income. I knew I wanted to teach short courses in woodland stuff in my woodland. However, when I started out I was starting more or less from zero. Age forty five and starting right back at the start again with seventeen year olds. That was humbling.

But you may have noticed I’ve not posted anything for a while. I am so busy, I’ve literally not even had time to leave comments or like the fine musings of Walter Egon. (though I have been reading Walter, love the muntin work - as always, exceptional). So I thought I’d write this up after a day in a woodland where I managed to fell a total of 77 oak trees.

Treeschool

I finished my course at treeschool in the spring of this year (2024). Weirdly, I’d done my teaching qualifications way back in 2010 and somehow, through a combination of people retiring and leaving, I ended up with my trees and woodland management teachers job - albeit in a part-time capacity. That was fortuitous.

Work Experience

I had two work experience placements during treeschool. One was at “the estate” where I later went onto work for two days a week and the other was at “tree company”. You’ve probably figured out by now, that these are not the real names of the places. I’m keeping the names abstract because the names are not that important. The names have been changed to protect the innocent kind of thing.

Treecompany was in reality about a six-month thing. I got on well with everyone, but I think I gave it the kiss of death when I was suddenly booked out for three months at the estate. I was never asked back, but I do still get on with the owners and those people that I am in contact with.

The Business

I did absolutely end up with a tree business - but it does techwork for a very select bunch of customers (so select, that there is only one). I had very much hoped to be working in the business two days a week. My plan was to have the other three days a week filled with an actual job (the backup plan) that brings in an income. Retraining is fun, but there’s only a certain amount of money available to fund it and once that was gone (which it now is) a salary is essential. Taking a salary from a new business is the kiss of death and I’ve always advised other people never to take a salary until you have one years worth of it in the bank after the king has stolen taxed his share of your hard work.

Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face

To be clear, I didn’t actually get punched in the face. I’m in the right line of work for it, and I am bit of a smart arse, so I am expecting it to happen at somepoint. I did sort of metaphorically punch myself in the face though.

My working week originally looked like three days at The Estate and somehow I decided that I’d take up a part-time teaching position at Treeschool. The idea was that I’d use the weekends to run The Business. The deal was that as soon as the business was consecutively booked out on Saturdays and Sundays for more than two weekends in a month - it was a lovely plan - I’d get a full-time wage again (albeit about a third of what I was on in techworld) and I’d get to grow the business. Perfect plan.

I started at treeschool in the second week of August of this year. After one week I was offered / asked for the role to be full-time, so I promptly resigned at the estate. I was sad to see the estate go, I got on really well with the gaffer, but it wasn’t really for me. I loved working with him and I hope to work with him again in the future if our paths cross. There’s a much longer story to the resignation than I’m writing about, but short version is that whilst I loved working with the gaffer (the man has balls of steel when driving a tractor with a forwarder on it) and he taught me a lot and we had some great banter, there’s only so many metres of “the lord not lords” fence I can fix. It was in essence, a dead end job. I could have applied for the gaffers job when he retires in the future, but even then there’s no further I could go. And also, I’m just not that good around people with lands and titles. There’s something about me they just don’t like. Maybe they know, that I know, that they don’t have magic blood.

When I got to treeschool they were advertising for someone to do two days a week to make a week with the three that I was doing. As the start of term was approaching there were no applicants and it was looking like they’d be a massive hole in the teaching week. One thing led to another and I asked / was offered / doesn’t really matter how it happened – but I ended up full time. Teaching is not a dead end job, there’s loads to get your teeth into especially when you’re very much living and working in the topic. Trees and woodland management? I’m your man. What I lack in experience and hard won knowledge, I make up for in enthusiasm and a dedication to learning. There is this saying that “that those that can’t, teach” and I have never bought that. I prefer “those that can, do”. Yes, teaching is a bit of a niche endevour and it is not for everyone. Lazy? good luck prepping classes. Shy? Good luck standing up and dealing with a platter of humans from all walks of life who are staring at you to entertain and educate them.

The plan then changed to treeschool during the week, and The Business on weekends.

Burn Rate, Reversing Trailers & MPG.

There’s a concept in the business world of a burn rate. It’s the amount that your business burns though each month. I didn’t have any debt when I got into treeworld. I do now. I feel ok about it, but I’d lie if I said I was totally happy about it. In a nutshell, my personal finances funded my business somewhere around the ten thousand mark, I got a chipper on hire purchase for four thousand, and I put a blower, hedgetrimmer, two batteries and charging station on my credit card. All in all, I have about fifteen thousand of debt. Granted about ten of that is to myself and the business is charged 2.5% interest on it a year, but the other five is “acceptable”. It does however put my burn rate up. The monthly payments are about £150 give or take a few pennies.

The truck and trailer are the backbone of the business. A powerful pickup and trailer capable acting in concert to give me 3.5 tonnes of payload. That’s about enough to do a four hundred year old oak tree in about three trips. It’s certainly more than enough for domestic arb. However, my drive way isn’t big enough for two family cars, a pickup and a trailer so I had to rent storage space at a local storage yard. I should have needed two bays, as the total length of my rig was over the bay allocation space by about five feet. However, the bay backed onto a slope and owner was kind enough to allow me to dig out five feet into the bank. So he charged me for one bay – £65 a month which was acceptable.

So he was charging me for one bay, but then he had to move me. I could go into another bay that also had space on the back, but it was a very hard reverse with the trailer and I was surrounded by very expensive caravans, boats and motor homes. In short, it wasn’t working for me and I asked for two bays. Fair enough, this was now doubling the £65 to £130 a month.

I was noticing on jobs was that the setup of getting the truck and trailer to the house and loading up the chipper onto the trailer was taking about two to three hours of time. I was starting to doubt my rig. Was it the right rig? Didn’t matter, it’s what I had and I could afford the extra rent because I was working on weekends. Business costs - nothing more.

I’m driving 300 miles per week to work and back. Treeschool is about a 60 mile round trip and my ancient rav4 (trusty and I love it) gets about 24mpg if you’re hammering it and about 32mpg if you’re driving like a grandmother. I was starting to think. The business has a truck, it costs £300 in “road tax” (commercial rate) and about £500 in insurance a year. Then I have £130 a month in storage costs. That’s about £2300 give or take each year.

What if I had a van instead of the truck and trailer and what if the van belonged to me personally, rather than the business. I could then use the van without getting hammered by “benefit in kind” theft tax. As a bonus, I could still get the chipper in the back and it could live on the drive. I could sell the truck and trailer, pay myself the money back and use that to buy a van with mileage better than the rav4.

Getting rid of the truck and trailer is a no brainer, it means I can do more with less. But where would I find the time?

There’s no time for treework!

I did know that new teachers experience a year of hell. That first year of teaching is a nightmare. Prepping stuff for class, finding your feet, learning all the stuff that you don’t see as students (ten million acronyms, process for this, a process for that, a spreadsheet here and word document there) takes a lot of time.

I teach eighteen hours a week over four days of the week. Fridays are my desk day and that’s the day that I have to get all the paperwork done and planning for the next week. LOL. I am routinely up until well past midnight on most nights of the week and up at the crack of dawn to make a 30 mile journey through busy congested motorways from Northumberland, into Tyne & Wear and then finally into Durham.

It’s also been eating up my weekends. I have managed to keep one job on the go though, a lovely woodland thinning job where there’s about 1000 oaks to come out of a twenty-five year old woodland. I was there today. It was glorious late October day.

I learn something everytime I’m there. It’s really good fun working small trees on a first thinning as you can / have to get them to do crazy things to get them on the ground due to the densely woven canopy. And that brings me back to learning and the question that now seems to have an obvious answer – did I really think I’d be done learning once I’d finished being a student at treeschool?

Continuous Learning

Obviously the answer to the above question is “no”. However, the learning experience in this new context is not a magical fun experience. It is in fact brutal – especially on my sleeping schedule. I’m not complaining about the late nights though, one thing about teaching is that it is by far the best way to re-enforce knowledge and learn a topic. You HAVE to be right when you’re teaching people. My area of lecturing is trees and woodland management, so that means I am upping my knowledge in this area well beyond the level 3 knowledge I need. I have this sense that I’m going to end up doing an MSc in this topic (level 7) - I can feel it. The other side to teaching is that you get to hone your craft. Teaching is not a case of standing up and reading words off of a presentation. It’s about leveraging the activities of a group of people at different parts of the learning journey to drive them up Blooms Taxonomy. At level three (what I teach) you’re basically concerned with getting people to the applying and understanding level.

I try to do things that benefit me in at least two ways. This allows you to get the most from what you’re doing. Teaching does a few things for me. Firstly, it’s helping me hone my craft so that when the day comes to go solo and start teaching in my woodland (at least five-ten years away) I’ve got a solid teaching game. Secondly it gives me a salary, which I am very grateful for. But it also gives me a third thing – a reason to continue to learn the area of trees and woodland management.

YouTube & Treework

I imagined that when I graduated, I’d have this tree surgery / arboriust business and that I’d be just like the people on YouTube. I’m not. I do have some YouTube videos, but I’ve not made one in a while an I’m unlikely to add anything anytime soon. One thing that YouTube doesn’t show is that vast array of jobs in treeworld. Sure, everyone wants to see someone climb up a massive tree and dismantle it, but there’s much more to it than that. Did you know it’s possible to scan the internals of a tree and produce a 3D image of the decay?

Jamie - are you saying you’re going to be a teacher, do a masters and get into tree surveying?

Not quite. I’m saying that now that I’ve arrived in treeworld, there’s a tonne of things to do. I certainly want to remain “on the tools” as the work is great and keeps you in great shape. I also want to remain as far away from “business speak” world that I can. “hey, can you get me the KPIs for our recent APAC campaign with our FMCG vertical” 🤢. I don’t miss that world. I much prefer the world that has me coming home with three woodlands worth of soil under my fingernails and smelling of sawdust and petrol.

However, being totally frank - I am approaching fifty which means nothing in itself, but I do have to prepare for the days where everything hurts. For example, my left wrist is killing me today from throwing brash too aggressively. There will be a day that physical work can only take place every other day. I hope those days start when I am 90, realistically they’ll probably start when I hit sixty.

I didn’t realise how much I liked physical work until I started doing it more and I fully recommend to anyone who can take the hit on their salary, to ditch the desk job. However, I’ve got twenty five years at least in working with tech and there’s a tonne of tech in treeworld. Survey gear is one area, but then there’s the software like geospatial databases (QGIS) and Autocad. Not everyone in treeworld has those skills and they are the type of service a business can make some nice gold from. I do have those skills – I don’t intended on letting them decay and I do intend on getting some of that gold.

So let’s go back to what I originally intended to do: treework, woodland stuff and making stuff from the arisings of my work. I’m kind of there, but not quite. I have a tree company, but it isn’t full-time. I am doing woodland work, but at the expense of neglecting my own woodland (I have been only six times this year to work it - oh dear) and the workshop - let’s not talk about the workshop.

I still intend to get to the point in my life where my week is composed entirely of my own business. Some survey work, some woodland management work (some desk and some tool), some teaching and most importantly, some woodcraft. It somewhat saddens me that the only thing I’ve made this year is the hearth (still needs the wood work doing, but I did get it framed and tiled) and half an outdoor kitchen.

Pithy ending

They say it is about the journey, not the destination and I agree. I said I’d follow my nose on the tree journey of mine. Truth be told a bit part of it was a giant leap of faith at the mercy of the gods. I sacrificed a rock solid tech career to see what would happen. I’m not quite where I want to be though. I have a truck and trailer to sell, my woodland needs some attention as 1200 trees arrive in less than fifteen weeks, and I seem to have taken a sojourn into teaching and will likely end up doing a MSc (and we all know that’s leading to a PhD don’t we?)

However, my life now is entirely tree based. As I write this, I stink of chainsaws and sawdust and I’m about to light a fire made of firewood that I felled, split and stacked myself. Tomorrow I’m preparing classes for after the half-term in my new career as a lecturer in trees and woodland management.

So am I living a life of treedom? You tell me.

Thanks for reading and as always – I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie.

p.s - it may be a while before I post again. Busy bee.

I really don’t have a team. There’s joy (and pain) to be had in both worlds. So when the opportunity came to take on a thinning job for two days a month for as long as it takes to get through 65 acres, I was all over it. The woodland is in Northumberland, somewhere off the A68. Twenty years ago this woodland was nothing but a sheep grazing field. Today it’s ready for it’s first thinning.

I arrived on-site for 8:30 and the owner met me there. We ran through the plans and the spec. It was pretty straight forward. I was to work a section called the top field and remove everything marked with a yellow dot. Stems were to be snedded and the brash left in piles where it fell. Logs to be cut to metre long lengths and stacked in groups to make harvesting as easy as it can be. These logs were all destined for firewood as they’re too small for proper woodwork. There’s little heartwood in the trunks at this age and oak is all about the heartwood.

But how do you decide what trees to remove? That’s a good question to ask. Allow me to demonstrate. Below are three marked trees from within the same area. The one on the left was selected because it was twisted. That twist will never go away and it’d make for an awful bit of timber. No one would enjoy working that wood. The centre image shows an oak that has decided to create significant bend in the stem. Whilst the grain may be ok in the resulting timber, there’d be little to mill because of the bend. Finally on the right you can make out the twin leader habit the tree has decided to adopt. Whilst the timber may have “character”, there’d be little of it and there’s a likelihood that the tree would split or be lost to storm damage. In short, none of these trees had good genetics. So they had to go.

By thinning the amount of trees in a given area, you remove competition for resources. There’s more light, water and nutrients for less trees. That directly translates to more growth on the trees with favourable genetics and that dear reader, directly translates into a better payout for whomever owns the woodland in the year 2140. Yes, that’s correct, twenty one fourty. Oak takes a minimum of one hundred and twenty years to reach harvest. I’ll be LONG dead by then.

Below you can see the area where the above three trees were removed. That gap will soon close up over the coming years and the resulting foliage will power the expansion in girth of all of the trees you can see in the photos.

One of the challenges in doing a “first thin” is that most trees will get hung up when you fell them. This can be avoided to some extent by capitalising on gaps in the canopy and using certain felling techniques to get trees to fall into opened spaces. I found myself using a felling technique called the “split level” a lot when working this site. You’d use this technique when you want a tree to go in the exact opposite direction that gravity wants it to. When you’re working trees this size, you cannot use wedges as there’s not enough room, so you use a felling lever. I don’t want to digress into a discussion of the split level technique, so I will simply show you one I performed quite well except for one critical error. Ten points if you can spot the mistake.

One of the things the gaffer at the estate gives me grief for is leaving a high stump. On the above example that stump is too high. You may not think so, but when you’ve burst a tractor tire on something like this, or tripped up on it when planting trees you begin to develop a very low tolerance for any stump that sticks up in any way, shape or form. If this was a timber tree and a final felling I should have been shot for leaving that much wood on floor. Every inch matters in forestry (that’s what she said ) because you’re not getting paid for anything other than the logs you produce. If you leave four inches on a stump, that’s money you’ve wasted. Needless to say, I went back and cut the stumps down to ground level whilst doing my absolute best to keep my chain out of the dirt. Nothing blunts a chainsaw faster than hitting dirt. Even a tiny contact can cause you to have to stop and resharpen.

Once I hit my stride, my stumps got constantly lower and I got faster and faster. Lunch came around quickly and I was famished. My lunch on that day was a homemade flatbread with melted cheese and bacon. Greggs bacon and cheese wraps have nothing on these. All washed down with a coffee to re-caffinate me for the rest of the day. One of the more pleasant things about this kind of work is all the nature and ecology. On my way back to the saw after lunch I noticed a few of these “oak apples”. Do not eat the oak apples. They are wasp eggs.

I absolutely hammered the afternoon and when I called it a day at 3:30 I’d felled and processed one tree every nine minutes for a total of 33 trees. When I think back two years to that that period of time in treeschool when we first felled trees, it was taking me nearly forty minutes to do a single tree. I’d say nine minutes is a nice improvement.

I must have done something right because the owner has asked me back in two weeks time. Only next time I’ll be doing some high pruning as well as thinning. All in all it was a lovely days work in a stunning location on a beautiful day. It’s something to think that when these trees reach maturity and are ready for harvest I probably would have been dead for at least half a century.

As I was just the hired help, no one will ever know. Except me and the trees. That’s the thing with this line of work, it’s personal between you and the trees.

I appreciate your attention.

Thanks for reading,

Cheers,

Jamie.

The first Job

One of the bread and butter jobs in tree world is referred to as “conny bashing”. In plain english that translates to removing conifers that have overgrown a space. I’ve groundied on loads of them, but this job was mine. I was to be the climber. The tree in question belonged to a customer in Newcastle Upon Tyne.

I was first offered the job in 2023. I nearly took it on and my plan was simply to ram the tree into the back of the rav4 and do ten thousand journeys to the woodland where presumably some magic would take place and it would be magically transformed into woodchip. Thankfully I came to my senses and declined the job on the condition that I’d be available to do it in the summer of 2024.

True to my word, twelve months later, I returned and the tree was six foot bigger in all directions. I was nervous about this job and I made no secret of sharing that with you all. However, as it turns out, there was no need for the pre-job nerves as it all went out without any of those fears coming true. It didn’t go according to plan though, more on that later.

Set up

We arrived at the job for 9:30 and got ourselves properly set up. Check me out - chevrons, cordoned off area and signage at both ends of the public highway. Yes, that came out of the risk assessment.

On a job like this you need a minimum of two people – a climber and groundie. Technically your groundie needs to have a climbing ticket so that in the event you get injured, you can be rescued. Jacob does because I’m starting off as I mean to go on with this tree company of mine (let’s call it the business) and I plan to do all the necessary audits and best practice to get the business approved as an “arb approved contractor”. I’ll write about why at a later point but the way I see it is that I want to operate at a certain standard, at a certain price point for people who value the work. It’s a big topic, so that’s all I will say for now. The guy I was working with is known to me, he’s called Jacob and I was his groundie whilst I was doing my work experience at the tree company.

Up

The process on a removal of a leylandii is straight forward. You put on your climbing spikes, get a strop (ideally steel core) and spike up the tree. In the UK you also use a secondary line in case you do something dumb like cut through your strop. Easily done on a rope strop, harder to do on a steel core. Despite the fact the below picture shows a standard strop (the green rope), I was using an orange steel core strop for the bulk of the day.

Once you start ascending the tree you are basically removing every limb as you ascend. The game is to make sure you’re not swamping your groundie with too many limbs and to always pay attention to their location so you don’t drop limbs on the their head. Shouting “clear” is a polite thing to do, as is ensuring the limbs fall with the end of the cut branch facing the groundie. Limbs go into a chipper branch end first. If you drop them so that they land like this, everything goes faster and you save about 50% of your groundies energy. Here’s Jacob taking first blood with the treedom chipper. I’m gonna write something up about this thing. For what it does, it’s a monster.

The Top

Once all the limbs are removed, you get to a point where you cannot go any higher – the top of the tree. In this case, the tree had six tops because that’s what this species does. The view at the top was nice. If you’re a local to the area you can probably work out the location.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have my rigging ticket and I wasn’t going to rig anything down, but I knew in my heart of hearts that not rigging the tops down was reckless so I decided to rig the tops out. I don’t have fancy pants arb rigging gear which is feather light (so you can climb up with it on your harness) and quick to set up (the last thing you want is a fiddly setup when you’re at the top). All I have is my forestry gear, which whilst being correctly rated and totally legit, is basically heavy, fiddly and a challenge to work with at height.

The tops were about five inches where I was spiked onto, and the wind was yarking me about a bit. The process for doing tops is pretty straight forward. You place the rigging system beneath (hence the term negative rigging) where you’re going to cut. Then you put your face cut in. The face cut must be deep enough to give the top the momentum, but not so deep that the top falls out without being tied into the rigging system. It is hoop twitching stuff I tell you.

Once the face cut is in you connect the rope. A half hitch finished off with a running bowline and if you’re being fancy pants – which I was – a stopper knot. The system was good for 71kg when accounting for force multipliers. This was more than ample as the tops were probably about 40kg max.

Once you have done your rope work you do the back cut and it should - at least in theory - fall forwards into the face cut. The first top did just this, The second top didn’t. The wind got it and tried to push it backwards, but I got in there and muscled it against the wind and it went down fine. Top three was fine. The other tops were small enough for me to cut and throw down. One thing that is worth mentioning is that when negative rigging, especially tops, the groundies job is the most important. They have to know to “let the rope run” just enough so that the top gradually slows down on its way to the ground. It’s a hard thing to learn and you only learn by doing wrong a few times. If your groundie holds that rope tight and doesn’t allow the rope to run, the top falls out and then shock loads the system which then shakes the stem. Watch any video on YouTube with tree cutting fails and you’ll see an example.

With Jacob running the ropes though, it was joyful. When you negative rig something, especially a top, the buzz is outstanding. One second there was a tree, the next there is a pole and you know your job is half done. The saw, the ropes, the wobbling stem and the heights all create a buzz that is addictive. Here’s a photo of me buzzing after top two went down. Wild Eyes.

Down

When the tops are out it is case of chunking down the tree in sections. It is called “chogging”. I got the big 462 out for this job as it requires some power. It’s a bitch to start when dangling from a rope, but it is a fast cutter. However, all did not go according to plan.

In a nutshell, the vitally important – but TINY – circlip that holds the chainsaw clutch system together must have either snapped, or wasn’t properly put on by yours truly when I maintained the saw a few weeks ago. At first I noticed a slack chain which I tightened up. Problem solved I thought. Wrong. Then I noticed smoke (never a good sign) and I could feel the bar and chain were red hot. Oh dear, no oil to the bar - the bar must be blocked, so I passed the saw down to Jacob to fix. That’s when we realised the entire clutch assembly had shattered. So I had to finish the chogging with a tiny bar (which took ages). Oh well, at least I had the smaller 261 with me – “one is none” as they say. That clutch is gonna cost me about £60 to repair. Bugger. Oh well, shit happens.

Terra Firma

Finally, after I was up for about four hours we got down to the height where I could fell the stem. After being on spikes for half a day, there’s no feeling like walking on the ground again. Pure bliss.

I felled the stem super high because the customer asked me if I could make a seat from the lower half of the stem. I was delighted to. One of the things behind the name “Life of Treedom” is the idea that there is no waste. So when a customer asks if they can have a seat from what would be ultimately a waste product, it is a win win. I have less to cart off and they have something to remember the tree by.

Waste (or not)

No waste is a key concept. I meant to get a picture of the trailer full of chip, but I forgot because I was under a time pressure to get the woodchip to a local allotment where it was to be used for paths and mulching. The recipients got a few hundred kilograms of woodchip for free and I got to tip the trailer locally. Winner winner chicken dinner.

All that was left was “the heavy” and the final dumpy bag of crap. The heavy is the name given to the collection of logs that are too big for the chipper, which for me is pretty much everything over three and half inches. My chipper is a teeny tiny one, but it also had a teeny tiny price - £5000 second hand with forty hours on it rather than £20,000 second hand for a similarly used on one capable of eating stuff up to six inches. I’ll take the £5000 one for starting out.

Time was cracking on and we had to get home. I couldn’t put the heavy in the trailer as the chipper was in there. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation that I’ll write about soon. So the heavy stayed for the night in a public place in Newcastle. I’ll be honest, I was hoping it would be gone the next day as frequently this happens when firewood sized rounds are left for everyone to steal.

The next day

Sadly, when I drove back to the job the next morning all the heavy was there, so I loaded it all into the trailer and drove it down to treedom woods. This was my first big load with the trailer and the truck. It‘s a 3.2 litre diesel capable of towing 3500kg. The trailer weighs 800kg and I suspect I had about 1200kg of wood on back. It wasn’t as scary to drive as I thought, but you really do need to drive differently when you’re pulling a load like this. Slow and steady wins the race.

I tipped the load out (the trailer is a fancy pants hydraulic tipper one) and decided to use the rounds to line the parking space. Leylandii is a weird mix of Cuppresso and Cyprus. It is an oddity in that it is a rare case of species hybridisation and whilst it gets a lot of hate for its incorrect use in the urban context, it is actually a very nice rot resistant wood. You wouldn’t want to make cabinets out of it, but in an outdoor setting it’s great - especially for that “woodland vibe”

Getting out was fun. I had to reverse the trailer into a very tight space between the oak logs and the alder tree. Reversing trailers is hard and I did burn the clutch a bit doing this. Gah. I really must get the turning circle sorted at the woodland. Ideally I want to be able to drive up to the woodland, get into the turning circle, dump my load and leave. Once in a while I’ll take the chipper to the woods and chip the brash onto the rides. This is all future stuff though.

That’s a wrap and a new beginning.

I wanted to share with you all the first tree job and to declare that I am now open for business. I’ll be only be doing Saturdays and Sundays for the next few years as I start teaching at treeschool three days a week and I’m working the estate two days a week. Something is gonna have to give, but I’m going to give it some time. For now I will limit the treework so that I can give the business proper roots.

Anyway, I’m at the end and normally I’d get Mrs Treedom to proof read but it’s half six on a Sunday, I’m back from another job (which I will write about later, but in short I’ve spent all day thinning an oak woodland where I managed to fell, process and stack the wood from one tree every 9.2 minutes for six hours straight) and I have to put my gear away and cook dinner. So I’m just going to press send and fix the typos later.

But yay - first job done and I am now open for business!

Thanks for reading,

Cheers,

Jamie

“You’re not very experienced in driving a trailer on your truck - how are you going to park it at the job?”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

“Have you even thought how you’ll fit the chip, the heavy and the chipper onto your trailer? Of course not, you imbecile”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

“You don’t even have ramps for your trailer so even if you could reverse it into your workshop drive (which I doubt you can because that’s something else you’re not confident at) how are you gonna get the chipper into the trailer?”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

“You’re not even used to using your chipper yet. Bit risky using for the first time on a job isn’t it? What do I know though? I just remember and process everything.”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

“Remember you’re behind in your woodland work and there’s no space to dump the chip because some bright spark (~you~) decided to get two massive logs and then fail to mill them which has blocked the parking space. Genius move there buddy.”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

“You are never going to be able to manoeuvre the truck and the trailer in busy streets without hitting something. You’ll be there for hours, blocking the roads and ending with an expensive crescendo involving an insurance claim and someone else’s property. You may even kill someone. For fucks sake Jamie.”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

My subconscious didn’t stop. I think I lay awake for about two hours in the hot Corfu night (28ºc) sweating and feeling anxious being tortured by an entity with unfettered access to all of my fears. The massively elevated heart rate was an added bonus.

“Also, don’t forget for some mad reason you also started a teaching job. Thanks for that mate; as if I didn’t have enough to worry about.”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

I was convinced that every negative thought that bubbled up was a fact. I was convinced I couldn’t do any of it. Now I must add that this isn’t unusual. It happened once in December of 2017 and then became a regular feature of December nights.

I meditate. Not as much as I used to, but the practice is still there. The general principle is that in the whole of your life there are only three phenomena present in the whole of your life regarding your consciousness:

1. Thoughts & sensations appear

2. Thoughts & sensations persist

3. Thoughts & sensations disappear

A basic function of the act of meditation (as I understand vipassana) is concerned with nurturing your ability to mentally step back so that you notice, rather than be distracted by and engaged with, each of these three stages. I know this. I’ve trained it.

“The trailer service people aren’t going to be happy with you – they had that trailer in their workshop for two whole weeks blocking up their space. You insensitive moron.”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

However, on this sweaty, sticky and painfully hot night, somewhere between 2am and 4am I had apparently lost all of my meditation powers. I had become distracted by waves of doubt and anxiety. Completely entranced by the subconscious belief that beneath all the exterior posturing of confidence that the world sees, I was nothing more than a constantly scared human.

Here’s the thing though, I am scared – constantly.

They know you’re not a real teacher you know. Especially the second years. Fraud, fraud, fraud.

🫀 thump thump 🫀

In fact, being scared is now more or less a default state because everything is new and everything is very real. There’s no one left to blame but me. I am the lead. I am the team, there’s no escaping it. Being scared has been the prominent way I have experienced most of my days in treeworld whether in Treeschool, Tree Company or The Estate. And now, thanks to the rod I have inserted firmly into my own back, The Business.

“Why did you even change careers you cretin? That was a cushy thing you had there and it the challenges were known and we could do it. Now you’re back down to the bottom of the heap, you’re a no one again. A total and utter worthless pleb.”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

So far, only a few times have my fears come true and they’re both cramp1 related. Every other time, they have not. If anything, my fears and mindset have helped me pay more attention to matters in hand. It’s not fun and I don’t enjoy the mindset of being scared, but it is important to note that it’s nearly always mostly fine. Nearly always – sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the worst things happen.

“You said you’d never get finance, and there you go, financing a chipper. What if you don’t make the money back and suddenly you’ve got an expensive machine, no use for it and a monthly commitment. Did you think about that you wally?”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

Being scared and having this mindset is annoying2. It gets in the way of everything else because it comes at a cost to others around me. I’m crustier and more crispy. Less tolerant and less jovial. I tend to have more of a thousand yard stare. But here’s another thing though, I know this mindset will pass. Once I’ve done a few jobs with The Business I’ll be fine loading the chipper onto the trailer. I’ll be fine using the chipper. I’ll be fine manoeuvring the truck and the trailer. I would have figured out how to dump the chip at the woodland. That log will be milled.

You get the picture – everyone of these fears will be overcome as I learn. Then there will be new fears, because there always will be more to learn. Learning new things is a hard and uncomfortable experience – especially as we age. I’ve chosen to learn an entirely new career pathway. The very fundamental way in which I provide for my family (money and attention) has changed. It is not a small thing by any stretch of the imagination.

“How do you like this now eh?, I’ve got you and you’re never getting back to sleep. You’ll spend all tomorrow being exhausted. I’ll teach you not to ignore me. Now you know who is in charge of this meatsuit – it’s me. I’m the driver and you’re nothing but the wheels and the steering.”

🫀 thump thump 🫀

So yeah, it’s scary and I’m scared. For the most part, I am grateful to my fears when they inform me and get out of my way. However, when they interrupt my mindset by attempting to dominate my attention (which I’ve tried to simulate by littering them in with the prose of this post) here’s what I say to them though.

Also, I got back to sleep. It is a special power.

🛌

And a LOT has happened in a few months. Some of it you know about, but most of it you don’t. However, I’m saving most of the unknown stuff for some later posts whilst I play catch up on what’s been going on. All I wanted to do with this post is start closing in on the end of being a student at treeschool.

Two years ago, it was all a dream. The idea of moving my income from technology to arboriculture & forestry was laughable. Now, it’s reality. I have the dregs of one assignment left to complete, but after that all of the theory work and all the units are done and my time as a student at treeschool draws to a close.

Tickets

So here’s a brief recap on the tickets I’ve managed to get in two years at tree school.

• NPTC Chainsaw crosscutting and maintenance

• NPTC Felling and processing small trees (up to 380mm diameter)

• NPTC Felling and processing medium trees (380 - 760mm diameter)

• NPTC Processing individual windblow trees

• NPTC Tree climbing and aerial rescue

• NPTC Operation and safe use of a mobile elevated working platform (MEWP)

• NPTC Using a chainsaw from a rope and harness

• NPTC Using a chainsaw from a MEWP

• NPTC Operation and safe use of hand fed wood chipper

• NPTC Basic tractor skills

There are still two tickets I’m working towards (rigging and dismantling, aerial pruning) but they’re more advanced tickets and whilst I probably could fudge my way through them today, I’ve want a little more skill development as a tree climber before I go and do those. I’ll get them, but I imagine it’ll be 2025 when I do those tickets. However, with the ten tickets I already have, I am now able to get all the insurances I need in order to run a small tree business. More on that in another post though because there’s news on that front.

The tickets are “bolt-ons” and they’re served as additional extras. The actual course I’ve been studying at treeschool is a City & Guilds “Level 3 Advanced Technical Diploma in Arboriculture and Forestry”, but everyone calls it “level 3 arb” which gets abbreviated to L3 arb. Whilst it is a little bit about forestry, at treeschool it is skewed heavily towards arboriculture (arb) because that’s where the work is at in the North East of England.

L3 Arb Course Content

But let’s break down the L3 arb course a little bit because over the two years it covers a lot of ground. It took two full time years to cover everything. Each of the below paragraphs is a ‘unit’ and they’re not in chronological order. They’re actually ordered by their module numbers.

301 - Principles of health and Safety. A tour of relevant legislation working upwards from the Health & Safety Act 1974 and understanding how to implement safe working practices. Kind of important given the context. Risk assessment process of "site, task, machine” is introduced and connected with first aid and manual handling principles. Wraps up with the five types of fire extinguishers and their use. This was one of the first things in first year for obvious reasons.

302 - Undertake and review work related experience in the land based industries. I wrote about this one back in September of 2023. It’s a great unit because you get paid, but also because you learn how to put your skills into place against a “commercial reality” whilst being in people’s personal space. It can be quite emotional, which I didn’t expect. Also, you work a wide range of locations…

Land based machines. This unit is outstanding especially if you started it with little understanding of how two stroke and four stroke engines work. Two stroke engines blew my mind and as a result big diesel and petrol engines (four stroke) are now less of a mystery. This was a first year course and we were really just aimed at saws and woodchippers. The stuff that prepares you for work experience in between first year and second year. Chippers are scary things at first, then you get really comfortable with them. This is a dangerous mindset. You should always view them as the meat pulverising machines they are. Some have tracks, some have wheels. Some are towed, some are trailed. Some are fed with in-feed rollers and some are gravity fed. Some have built in stress systems and in some, you are the stress system. Here’s a tracked chipper below. It’s a bit of a niche machine, but it does the job. This was a great unit for getting you ready for tree world.

Plant & Soil Science. Trees live outside, and that means soil. There is essentially no such things as trees in the sense of species or as a noun. I think it is better to view “tree” as a verb (I’ll write about this at some point). Suffice to say plant science and soil science covers the basics of plant structures (different cells, different parts) and how each part contributes to a plants metabolic system (essentially the same as a humans with a different input output - carbon dioxide in, oxygen out). Soil as a concept is opened up so that you can see the how variety of life, organic matter, nutrients and composition of sand, clay and silt affect what grows in soil.

Estate skills. Fences, paths, rides, structures. Most people I think saw this module as a bit pointless but there was an edge to it in that you’ll make more money doing fences than you would doing trees. We used the module to plant and fence up a rather nice series of heavy standards (simply put - big trees in pots). Personally, in the woodland I do a lot of this kind of work which is why I got so much enjoyment from it.

Specialist project. This project is anything you want it to be. The thing you get marked on is your ability to write proposals, plans, record progress as you do it and then review the project once it is completed. I chose to make a QGIS map of my woodland, the sub-compartments and the tree stock.

Principles of tree felling and chainsaw use. This is one area of the course that is weird. Essentially it combines two NPTC tickets into one module. However, employers typically don’t recognise the module and prefer you to have the tickets. I suspect this is because they’ve poorly interpreted their insurance policies. By the end of this module you really, really know how to maintain a chainsaw and fell a tree. Unlike the ticket versions of this, you have to talk the assessor through everything and you cannot miss a single thing out. On the tickets, you can be prompted if you miss a thing. Not here. If you miss a thing, you fail the thing. This is the weird. It is harder than the corresponding tickets, but not recognised as a qualification.

Tree ID, planting and aftercare of plants for forestry and arb. This one we split up and did ID in year one and the planting and aftercare in year two. The rationale is fairly sound for doing this because the sooner your ID skills are developing the better. In fact, one game I like to play as I drive about is to ID the trees at the side of the road. For the ID we concentrated on the british natives (33 broadleaves and 3 conifers) as well as some of more popular non-natives such as norway maple, decorative cherries, a range of firs, pines, spruces and some of the more rarer and endangered examples on Houghall such as Metasequoia glyptostroboides. The planting side of things was also interesting and it was fascinating to see how forestry planting differed from arboricultural planting. Foresty is a case of 700+ trees a day. It’s very fast paced and a case of take two large steps, make hole with a spit, shove the tree in the hole, heel it in from all sides, give it a tug and make sure deers cannot rip it out. Take two steps… Arb was more a case of 6 trees an hour. Remove the grass, dig a hole for the tree, hammer in the stake, plant the tree, heel it in from all sides, apply a mulch mat over the tree and around the stake, pin the mat down, cover the tree with a tube, tie the tube to the stake, add some mulch. Take two steps…

Principles and identification of pests, diseases and disorders of trees. An important unit, especially for climbers. Knowing how to spot structural defects before you get into the tree is a key element of avoiding injury or harm to others. We covered the obvious things like fungi, bacteria and other diseases, but also looked at some not so well known problems. Road salt, mechanical damage from machinery, damage from vandalism etc. The unit left us with a comprehensive understanding of abiotic (not-living) and biotic (living) pathogens and how to identify, monitor and control / ameliorate those that can be. There’s a lot of fungi work in here and my prior experience in growing mushrooms (not that kind, the eating kind) came in very, very handy. A nice unit that also intersected nicely with bush craft and foraging, but I have to be clear - foraging was strictly forbidden at treeschool. I’m making that connection purely off my own back.

Urban & community forestry projects. This was a second year module and taught to us by a new teacher who happens to be an epic climber. If you have a group of trees around you in an urban environment, it’s an urban forest. So we did a lot of walking in this module exploring all the urban forests around treeschool. It’s a totally different kettle of fish managing urban forests when compared to woodland forests. It’s a very public process in which consultation and listening to stakeholders is as important to the survival and health of the trees as species selection and location. This module could easily become a course all on its own and is a topic close to my heart. At the back of my house is an urban forest, a rather large one totalling three hectares (9 acres). It’s beautiful, but it has a dark side. At night, the youth like to set the place on fire, during the day it’s a haunt for local drunks and arseholes on motorbikes. But that’s another story for another day and one all too familiar to any one in an urban forestry setting.

Woodland habitat management. Woodlands are fascinating places full of history and life (and drunks, and arsonists and motorbikes). Understanding the history of how woodlands came to be and how their interactions with local communities and economies shaped species development is fascinating. In short, a woodland that pays is a woodland that stays. A nice pithy quote for sure, but woodlands are complex where a subtle shift over here can impact a lot over there and vice versa. This is another unit that could have easily been a full course in itself. It’s certainly shifted my approach in treedom woods.

Principles of tree science. Whilst trees are certainly plants, they certainly do something special when they “tree”. There’s a lot to it from basics such as how access to water, light and nutrients shapes and affects tree growth, through to how biomechanics can influence the posture of a tree. It’s an important unit for arborists because we also took a reasonably deep look into wound response and how to properly wound (prune) a tree to stack the deck in the favour of achieving a certain outcome. In places where wounds failed to heal, we looked at decay and the types of decay. This was paired up with pests and diseases and considered against fungal colonisation strategies. A mature bonsai would have been a fantastic resource but we didn’t have one. Bonsai being another topic for another day. Biomechanics and the resulting timber it produces, is a topic I’m very interested in. On numerous occasions I’ve tried to write about it but never published it, so here’s a few images from an unpublished post from last year.

Tree & shrub pruning and maintenance. This module introduced us to CODIT and I wrote about it when I was doing the module. There’s a British standard for pruning trees called BS3998. It’s supposed to cost about £250~ to buy, but is is the kind of document that councils leave lying around on intranets with public access. What you’re actually paying for is a license to own a copy so if you download it and you don’t have a license, that’s on you. These documents are like software in that sense. However, it is nice to know there is a standard so that when you are doing work that is either commercial, for a local council, or on a tree with a tree protection order (TPO) you know exactly what is expected of you. However, in domestic arb world, all of it goes out the window. You do what the customer wants. You can spend your life telling them what you know, but at the end of the day, that tree is getting topped and that branch is getting cut right on the boundary and not at a suitable pruning point. Of course, this is not the modules fault and it is a fine module.

Emergency tree works. This is one of the units that I’ve been busy with recently. It’s hung off an emergency scenario1 and you have to complete four tasks. First, is list of procedures to follow. Second is a written piece on hazards and considerations to the scenario and dealing with windblown trees. Third is a risk assessment and method statement. When working, these are the kinds of documents you need to submit alongside bids when trying to win the larger juicy work and contracts. They are big documents and this one took me ages. Finally, as a separate presentation, you had to consider the legislation and case law that would affect the operations and how you’d handle that. You know how I like to draw things, so I made a nice drawing of it which is below. I was lucky here because I love doing windthrow stuff and it’s not a stranger to me. See sketchy birch over a path and a birch on a birch on an oak in an oak.

Operate, maintain and understand the principles of specialist forestry and arboricultural machinery. This unit built upon the first year land based machinery unit. After having my mind blown by two stroke engines the year before, this year my mind was blown by being shown how braking systems on trailers worked. We used some cool machines like tracked chippers, tractors, mini skid steers and massive stump grinders. Below are some little videos. The first is of the stump grinder that swallowed stumps and the second was of the mini-loader. The cool thing about mini-loader day was the obstacle course that was built that we had to manoeuvre the machine around and do certain tasks on. There was also a lot of paperwork for this unit from risk assessments to presentations. But there was a LOT of hands on troubleshooting and fixing in preparation for the real world.

Support arboricultural operations from the ground. This was another one of those weird units that actually covers multiple tickets. If you weren’t paying attention in practical you may have not noticed you were actually doing this unit. It was one of the first things we did in first year. We climbed a lot in first year, and every day started off with risk assessment and a discussion of legislation as well as how to set the work site up and introduced the concept of work zones and exclusion zones. As we developed our climbing skills we started practicing aerial rescues so that if a climber became stuck, we could rescue them. Every week was a progression of the previous. We learned about inspecting gear before use as well as performing a visual tree assessment before we climbed. It built on knowledge from the pests and diseases unit as well as principles of plant science. It was also an eye opening experience into the damage that grey squirrels (and just greys by the way) do to branches and limbs of trees. They do it in such a way so that you cannot see it from the ground. I think I’ve shared this one before, but below is a good all round image of me up a tree, next to squirrel damage.

Arboricultural skills and Advanced arboricultural practices (two units over two years). These units were largely the basis for practical. They ran first year to second year and if you weren’t paying attention, they would have morphed into one another. The advanced second year module was one of the highlights as I got used to knocking the tops out of trees. Ultimately it is what lead to me doing (but not completing) the biggun. By this time we were able to climb on a basic two rope system (two ropes, two prussic loops) but we’d each started developing our own preferred systems. I’m leaning more towards less impactful ways of accessing a tree (the days of speedy youthful recovery are behind me) such as getting a line in high using a throwline and climbing on a zig zag and a foot ascender. We got used to using cambium savers, redirecting ropes and understanding how to minimise (if not eliminate) any harm to a tree when climbing it. We learned how to do aerial inspections, which is an avenue I am very keen to continue down along with bat surveys and other ecology related shenanigans. But best of all we got used to doing pruning whilst up a tree, using ropes for dismantling and taking apart small and medium trees. If there’s one module that people think of when they think of a treeschool, it’s this one. There is nothing quite like that feeling when you’ve knocked the top out and you’re being ragged about (just the right amount) at the top of the what was a tree, but is now a pole.

Tree surveys and inspections. Some of my classmates at treeschool have tried the arb world and prefer to make their money (and more of it) in an environment with less poo and where they are not facing risks each and every day. This is the unit that they thrived on. Truth be told, it’s also a unit that I really enjoyed. I cannot physically climb and cut five days a week, every week, as a long term strategy. If I was twenty, maybe I could do fifteen to twenty years of it, but eventually it’ll catch up with you. So I paid attention in this module. My background in design helps a lot with this stuff, as does the tech background. It makes layout and fancy pants presentation something I’ve already invested in and so, I can make stuff look nice and in alignment with a brand. If you’re interested you can see my report here. The tech world has made database systems and coding and geographic information systems very familiar, so doing inspections and surveys and reports is something I find very appealing as I have certain skills other people may not. Being older when you get into arb has many benefits. But the coolest thing about tree surveys and inspections is that they’re another string on the bow of a one man band. And that’s 100% another story for another day.

Wrapping up.

Most qualified, least experienced.

Probably the main thing I’ve learned over the last few years is that qualifications are mostly pointless unless you do stuff with them. I joke about being the most qualified and least experienced person on a crew, and whilst it is funny, I don’t like that it is true - although increasingly less so. This is why I’ve been working hard at the estate, the woodland and when doing domestic work at treecompany. Theory is nearly useless without direct practice and both theory and practice require repetition and time. You could say if learning is a tree then theory may be the cellulose, experience may be the lignin. The leaves of your knowledge grow on this tree. Practice is the sun that allows it all to photosynthesise and feed itself so that it grows big and strong.

Fun.

I’ve covered a lot of ground in this post and the last few years, but really at the end of the day, it all boils down to tree work being a massive amount of fun. So to close out, below is a photo of the largest tree I’ve felled so far. It was an old sycamore that was in danger of collapsing onto a three hundred year old farm house on the estate. Needless to say it had to be dealt with. It measured about forty inches. My thirty six inch bar wasn’t big enough. The tree was sycamore and the actual resulting saw log was very nice. No rot and nice and clean, so that’ll be headed to the mill. Hopefully I’ll get to mill it up in soon.

Ok, closing this out – there’s much more to share about developments in my life of treedom over the last four months but most of it is another story for another day. Now that I’m nearly finished being a student at treeschool, the production of content for the web rather than assessors will once again resume to a reasonable level. There’s lots of content to produce and for good reason… Whilst I’m nearly finished being a full-time student at treeschool, I’m not quite done with the place. You see, I’ve accepted a part-time lecturer position in trees and woodland management at treeschool.. I’ll explain later but suffice to say, I plan on putting the teaching materials I prepare in my own time to good use as content for you all here.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie

Before I get into specifics though I need you to indulge me a quick detour regarding UK law and trees. However, as I am an arborist and not a solicitor I don’t want to spend too long on the topic so I will keep it brief 😀.

⚖️ The Arborists Quick Guide To “The Law”

In the UK we have two flavours to our laws - Statue Law and Common Law.

Statue Law is when the Government (on behalf of the people with magic blood aka Monarchy) passes an Act or a set of Regulations that demand and enforce something because reasons.

Statue law has led to the concept of Tree Preservations Orders (TPO) through the Town and Country Planning Act and later the more specific The Town and Country Planning (Tree Preservation)(England) Regulations . Any tree with a TPO on it requires that planning permission be granted to perform any works such as pruning or removal. Failure to have planning permission when working on a tree that has a TPO could lead to eye watering fines 😢.

I often work the ground when we’re doing work on trees with TPO’s and the specifications are always very precise. Specifications (spec) such as “prune three metres back towards the boundary” or “thirty percent crown thin” are the common ones. There is no there’s wiggle room in these specs and it is wise to do what the spec says. You don’t do any more than the spec because the tree officer will club you over the head and possibly handy out a tasty fine. You don’t do any less because the customer is paying you to do a job and you’ll be there all day playing “I like the shape, but…”

Common Law is the concept that no one party is above the law of the land (🙄) and the mechanism for one party to bring a case against another party in front of a judge.

When a case is brought to a judge, the result is recorded and in the future when other cases of a similar nature are brought to a judge a previous judgement may be used to rule on the case. If there is no clear cut case to base a ruling off then one side will probably argue an existing ruling applies “because reasons”. The other side will argue it does not “because other reasons”. The judge listens to the cases, issues a ruling which is then recorded. The whole cycle starts all over again when the next case is brought. The cycle has been going on for approaching a thousand years since the Magna Carta started to become a permanent thing when it was sealed in 1215.

Common law in the UK has led to two main concepts regarding trees. “Trespass” is when a tree that doesn’t belong to someone “trespasses” from the owner’s land over a boundary and into a neighbours land. The continued presence of the branches and tree structure creates a “nuisance”1. If a neighbours tree crosses into your garden, you can cut it back to the boundary – but you should probably cut it back to a proper pruning point if neighbourly relations can withstand it (as defined in BS3998).

If you cut over the boundary without permission (even if your intention is to correctly prune the tree), then it is you who trespasses and you may find yourself on the wrong side of a criminal damage case. Even if you only go back to the boundary you must also give the parts that you have pruned back to the owner because if you don’t, that falls under “theft”. To defend against charges of “theft” you must return the parts without creating damage. No throwing the limbs over the fence as any divots in grass or smashed fencing would constitute criminal damage. So always ask the owner of the tree if they want the parts back, or if they’d like you to dispose of said waste.

Finally, as an operator in the tree you cannot use any part of the tree that is beyond the boundary to perform your work. This means no ladders resting on a trunk and no using limbs as an anchor point for work positioning as either of these would be trespass. It really is a murky world of joy.

The final concept I’ll mention with regards to Common Law, is that courts typically expect people to behave in a “reasonable” manner. So, if the only place to anchor your ropes so that you could work safely was over the boundary line, then there’d be every chance a judge would rule that even though you crossed a boundary, your reason for doing so fell under “reasonable”. Perhaps you repeatedly asked the owner of the tree if they’d like their tree back and they mindfully didn’t answer and so you chipped it, then a judge would likely rule that you made “reasonable” efforts to ask and that the owner was not responding in a “reasonable” manner. However, don’t make assumptions. Solicitors are the ones who make the case in courts for a reason and any sufficiently skilled “attack dog” lawyer (such as the ones wealthy people like to employ) could turn any situation around so that reasonable becomes unreasonable.

Long story short – If neighbourly relationships are anything other than healthy then a property boundary needs to be treat like the border of two countries. Breaching it could start a battle which turns into an inter-generational war. The initial issue that started the feud between the two families from from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” (Montagues and Capulets) actually started over a boundary issue with a conifer hedge.2

😡 💦 Angry Hose Pipe Man

Ok, thanks for that little indulgence, back to the story. The tree that this prose is concerned with has a TPO. It is a one hundred year old oak in the middle of a rather swanky housing estate in the North East of England.

Technically, you don’t need planning permission to prune nuisance limbs on a tree with a TPO as you are not the owner of the tree. However, the local tree officer has the power to disagree with you and slap you with a fine (courtesy of Statute Law). If you wanted to contest this fine then you’d have to go to court (thanks Common Law) to appeal. That’d cost you a pretty penny in legal fees and I’d not like to wager my money on the outcome. So the wise person contacts the local planning department, speaks to a local tree officer and follows their advice. This is what the customer had done. They were in possession of a granted planning permission application to carry out tree works on the nuisance branches that were trespassing into their land. This is where treecompany comes into the story.

The first time treecompany went to this job the team left without even getting as far as setting up. As soon as the team arrived on site the owner of the tree (let’s call him “angry hose pipe man 😡 💦”) came out and got quite aggressive with one of the team and threatened the team with a “good drenching from his hose pipe” if they even attempted to work on the tree. Reasoning with angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 didn’t work and the team left. The day was getting on and there were other jobs to be done.

The customer rang the police, he gave a statement and was told by the police that the work should be re-scheduled and if angry hose pipe man “piped up” 😆 again, he was to call 999 (not 101) and request support.

🏅 End of Level Boss

I was not there the first time. But I did specifically ask to go the second time because of the “hose pipe” issue. Learning about becoming an arborist isn’t always about trees, climbing and cutting. Sometimes there are other skills to develop, skills such as de-escalation, conflict resolution and giving bad news to someone who really doesn’t want to hear any more bad news. The not-fun stuff. It was technically a two person job, but we needed a third to handle angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 should he pop into action.

I normally work at treecompany on Wednesdays and Fridays as they are the days I am not at treeschool. However, this particular Friday (15th March 2024) was my last regular day at treecompany for a while because I start my new job at the estate on Wednesday the 20th of March 2024. I was looking to use this Friday as a day to test how far I’d come since I started at treecompany back in September of 2023. Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 represented something of an end of level boss 🏅 to me and when the teams were being organised on the Friday morning, I couldn’t have been clearer in my desire to be on angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 team and hopefully get to handle him.

We arrived on site and knocked on the customers door. He informed that two of his rather burly foremen were here to “help handle the situation” and be the two henchmen. Two units of human beings they were too - quite formidable.

As soon as we started setting up, angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 came out and singled me out. To be fair, I was wearing hi-vis and I am the oldest person on the team so people tend to assume I’m “the gaffer”. It also doesn’t help that I am the most qualified and least skilled3 member on the team either which is a trait that most gaffers seem to have. As a result, I frequently find myself having conversations that I probably shouldn’t have.

However on this occasion I wanted to be the target for angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 and I was. The hi-vis and strategic, but casual, positioning of myself in his field of vision attracted him straight to me – winner winner chicken dinner 🍗.

🤡 Idiot

A set of swanky, large, motorised gates opened and a well dressed older gentlemen walked through them saying “I am telling you now that getting your tools out is pointless because no work is taking place on that tree until I get notification from the council”. Ladies and gentlemen, this is angry hose pipe man 😡 💦.

Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 walked straight up to me, got right into my personal space and started saying words at me. Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 had not done his homework and had a misinformed understanding of the law regarding trees and boundaries. What he did have at his disposal, in ample amounts I may add, was the appearance of being threatening, an intense ability to talk at you, being “a bit spitty” when irritated and he also had access to a rather impressive array of water dispersal devices.

I repeatedly informed angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 as best as I could that we were here to do the work, and that “the job was going ahead” regardless of how he interpreted the law. Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 had two central bones of contention. The first, which was rather lame (but valid) was that he didn’t want us in the tree in case we injured ourselves and then we could sue him. He didn’t know it, but he was making a valid claim under The Occupiers Liability Act. However, at the end of the day, every team member that day was covered under the Health & Safety at Wort Act, Management of Health & Safety at work Act, PUWER, LOLER and a veritable tonne of other professional qualifications. In short, we were all skilled enough, and had the right legal permissions in place to do the work.

His second bone of contention was that work could not proceed as he had not received a letter from the council regarding the works. I repeatedly informed him that such a letter didn’t make any difference to us, as we had a copy of the approved planning permission and specification. However, angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 was adamant he was in possession of letter from the planning department stating that works cannot proceed until such communication was received. So he went away for five minutes and printed the email off. To the best of my ability to remember this is what it said (names have been changed for lols)

to: hosepipe@aim-it-at-the-bloke-in-the-tree.com

from: treeofficer@council.uk

Dear Angry Hose Pipe Man 😡 💦 ,

Please find attached the result of the planning application decision regarding the tree works. As to why you have not received a letter from the planning department in the post, I will chase that up for you and get back to you.

Regards,

Tree Officer

Planning Department

It was the contention of angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 that work couldn’t start, and indeed must not start, until a physical letter from the planning department had arrived. A letter that would contain - wait for it - the planning application decision. The very same planning application that was attached as a PDF to the email he printed out. I pointed it out to him that he should read the first sentence of the email again. He wasn’t having it. Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 was of the opinion that because the decision came through on an email rather than a letter in the post, no work could proceed.

At this point he was starting to get up in my face and his incessant pointing was verging on tapping my chest. He was getting quite confrontational and my heartbeat was quite high. At least 150bpm I reckon. On par with sets of ten burpees every minute on the minute. To quell the adversarial nature that the interaction was headed down I asked his name, which he gave and I introduced myself. It worked for a bit but then it didn’t and we started going around in circles. Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 was wrong but he wasn’t having any of it. I tried stating his point back to him (steelmanning) to get him to see that I understood his point. I managed to do this but he wouldn’t act in good faith and listen to the counterpoint (and correct point) that planning permission had been granted and work was going to start.

The henchmen loomed about ten feet away and were recording everything on their phones. Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 landed one poke on my chest. I told him to stop it, which he did. I gave him a very clear look. The kind of look that a wealthy man in his latter years doesn’t want to see from a manual labourer in solid physical shape. The kind of look that says, please - do that again – I could use the money from settling the assault charges to buy a whole bunch of machinery. Fortunately for me, the cameras couldn’t see my face – only his.

At this point I’d walked angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 through the “arborists quick guide to the law”. He may have been surprised that a manual labourer understood and could explain it all in a concise manner and I’d also walked him through the fact that because planning permission had been granted (a fact he chose to ignore even though it was printed for him to read) the work was going ahead – now.

The henchmen commented on how calmly I’d handled it. I was glad that’s how it looked, my heart rate was going nuts. Inside my head I was repeating to myself “low voice, slow pace, palm down gestures”. I sometimes convince myself I’m a coward at heart and so I use these opportunities to practice having courage. If there’s a way to learn how to do this without the heart rate, I’d love to know what it is.

🤫 🐏 It Gets Down From the Tree Otherwise it Gets the Hose Again and Again.

I want to climb more at treecompany, but there is a hierarchy and a pragmatism at play. The hierarchy is that I’m at the back of the queue, and the pragmatism is that even if I could climb, the aim of the game is to get through as many jobs as you can in a day. I’m a slow climber (nothing practice cannot solve) and so having me climb is diametrically opposed to the doing of more jobs because I am not the quickest. The jobs I get to climb on are the ones where it is impossible to take a long time (up – chop – drop) or jobs that can be dragged out a little bit because all the jobs are done and there’s a little spare time.

So on this job, I was not climbing. It was the first job of the day and I’d made it clear I wanted to handle angry hose pipe man 😡 💦. At this point he had been handled the best that I could – we were in a position to start work and the confrontation had been done. As my colleague started to ascend up the tree, angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 started spraying him with his hose pipe. This was the first of many aquatic assaults.

My colleague was the one who normally handles the confrontation with people and so he wasn’t holding back. “I’m not sure if you’ve not figured this out angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 but I get rained on quite a bit doing this job. The only difference here is that it’s coming from below”. Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 started singing “🎶 la la la la la la 🎶” as if he was simply out watering the garden and he happened to accidentally spray my colleague.

The bit angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 hadn’t thought about is how high his hose could spray. 15ft was the limit and as soon as my colleague was above that mark angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 turned the hose on those of of us working the ground. Eventually he got bored of soaking us on the ground and proclaimed “I think it is time to jet wash my fence”. Five minutes later of background “🎶 la la la la la la 🎶” and we heard a pressure washer spring into life and few seconds later we felt a mist. Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 was left defeated as the jet washer nozzle he was using had a shorter range than his hose pipe and it also atomised the water which turned it into a fine mist. For the next 30 minutes we endured a man learning in anger about how far each of his pressure washer nozzles would send water. Nothing sent water higher than the hose pipe. Angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 was being an idiot and acting like an idiot.

He was repeatedly attempting to escalate the situation and so I recommended the customer called 999. The henchmen departed and I explained to the customer that we needed someone that was both in a position of authority and power to tell angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 to cease his angry aquatic antics.

👮‍♀️👮‍♀️ Two Police Women

To be absolutely honest, the gentle mist of cooling water was quite nice. It was a lovely sunny day with little wind and we were working in a sun trap of a south garden in type c chainsaw trousers (all around kevlar). I was sweating and the mist was most welcome.

To be fair, this was not a high priority incident for the law and so it took the police about an hour to get to site. When they arrived, they asked what was happening, I explained it to them as best as I could and they then went to speak with angry hose pipe man 😡 💦. About thirty minutes later, they emerged from his house and stated “He will not be bothering you again, he has agreed to remain on his property until the job is completed and you’ve left”.

We completed the job. We had repeatedly asked angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 if he wanted his tree back, but he never responded. So we chipped it. We cleaned up the site and left. I’ve had a few angry jobs at treecompany, but this was the best by far and the first one I’ve handled myself.

I’m not lying when I say that I could practically feel the seething anger emanating from angry hose pipe man’s 😡 💦 house once the police had left. He fought the law and the law won.

Plot twist time…

🤯 I’ve Been the Angry Hose Pipe Man Tree Owner

The reason I am so familiar with the law on this topic is that I’ve been on the other side of it. Many years ago around 2015, I was the angry hose pipe man. Although to be fair to me, I didn’t use a hose pipe so I guess that makes me Angry Tree Owner 😡🌳. It’s a long story, but I didn’t get on with my neighbours for close to a decade, so I used a tree I owned as a political weapon against them4.

I mindfully didn’t prune the tree in question and eventually it grew to a point where the branches touched the neighbours garage. As soon as that happened, they called in an arborist to remove the offending branches and even offered to pay for the removal of the tree. When the arborist turned up to do his work I came out (😡🌳) and said he was not to cut back beyond the boundary, stated the relevant laws and went back into my house (😡🌳). My heart was pumping. A few minutes later he knocked on and said something like this.

Hello mate, look I understand you don’t get on with your neighbour for whatever reason. To be honest, I’m not bothered or interested in all that side of things. But they’re offering to remove the tree at their expense and I’m here to remove a few of their trees and either prune back this one, or remove it for you for free. Will you let me me at least prune it back properly? If I prune it to the boundary, it’ll not be doing it properly and your tree could suffer as a result.

I said no (😡🌳).

I was being an arse (😡🌳).

I was being a less aquatic version of angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 .

Three weeks later, on a Sunday morning, I got the ladder and a handsaw out, I got up that tree and it became my first dismantle. A few weeks later I started to repair relationships with my neighbour. That took a while, as we had both reached levels of petulance that most reasonable humans couldn’t reach. To be precise, it took five years on my part and when they moved house we all parted on good terms.

It was from this experience that three things happened. First, I got a taste for tree work and secondly, I got my first logs. I had no idea at the time, but the sycamore logs I managed to get out of that tree became the first wood I’d mill by hand and turn into things. It became incense holders, nice little boxes, drawer fronts and a host of other things. The third thing was that I learned that being a petulant arse of a human being doesn’t get you anywhere. It is fun, but it gets you nowhere.

It also became an integral part of the story today. It’d be easy to read this and think that you’d never be angry hose pipe man 😡 💦. Maybe that’s true for you. But it was not true for me. I’m grateful I managed to identify this petulant part of my personality and make efforts to deflate and eject it when I find it claiming squatters rights in my actions. If I’d not have done so I may not be doing what I do today. I may still be sat at a desk writing code, or managing people who write code. Or writing policies and procedures that apply to people who manage people who write code. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, if that’s what you’re happy doing with your time on Earth. I wasn’t. Instead, on Wednesday the 20th of March I start a new part time job working as an assistant forester at the estate5.

So when I heard there was a job on for the day where I got to be the arborist rather than the angry tree owner (😡🌳) I wanted to be on it so I could attempt to repay some karmic debt to the universe. In one sense I’m grateful to angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 for giving me the chance to think about such matters and connect some dots. Although if I were to be objective about matters - angry hose pipe man 😡 💦 is a vile bell-end 🍆 of a human being. One of these days, someone is gonna thump that man good and proper 👊🏻.

It was a great end to my first stint at treecompany. I ran the ground, assisted on the ropes and handled the angry hose pipe man 😡 💦. It may not have ended with me up a tree, rigging out some massive stuff in a productive and safe manner, that would get me a tonne of likes on instagram, but, I did end up realising how far I’d come in getting to grips with the basics of being a groundie and an appreciation of the continual effort it takes to work yourself into becoming a good human.

I appreciate your attention.

Thanks for reading

Cheers,

Jamie.

I’m finding it hard to dedicate time to writing. That’ll change in the not too distant future so here’s a little update.

Treeschool

Time is a little unkind to me at the moment. The “synoptic” (which basically means “exam”) period has nearly started at treeschool. It is hard to think that there is only twelve weeks left before I finish. The next mon…

Read more

Recently I’ve been working with a friend on one of his jobs. A clear-felling job for the local wildlife trust to remove four acres of Norway spruce so that it can be re-planted with native broadleaves. The site is classified as a plantation on ancient woodland (PAWS) and so returning the woodland back to broadleaf from non-native timber stocks is a long term gain for local wildlife and ecology. A short-term loss for sure, as there’s something about conifer woodlands. However, with a site like this there’s only one way forward – fell it all and start over. Approaches like “continuous cover” wouldn’t work on this site because reasons. You can see what the site looked like around the start of January 2024. Keep your eyes peeled for a shed…

Before this site was handed over a to a local wildlife trust it belonged to an avid bird watcher and there is a shed-come-bird-hide that had been there for years. In fact, most of the locals knew this place as “the conifer woodland with the shed”. As creepy as the shed was (and it was creepy) it was a feature. Despite hundreds of trees being felled around it, amazingly, the shed didn’t receive a single bump or knock.

Last week we had felled all of the remaining trees apart from one – the biggest one on the site. Because of the location of this tree on the site, it received more sunlight than any other tree and it whilst it wasn’t that much higher than the other trees, it was much fatter than the rest. The biggest tree I felled on that site came in at 71 cm in diameter. This tree was just over 100cm. It was massive and it was leaning right over that shed. Whilst felling trees is fun and practice is always required, I’m always looking for an opportunity to get more practice over a range of skills. So I had an idea. John made it clear that this tree was his. It was the biggest on the site and he’d earned it.

But the shed thing bothered us both. It managed to survive unscathed and we both had a sense that no matter what we did when felling it, the thing had so much weight on it that it was going to hit or crush the shed. So what to do? I offered to spike up the tree and remove the limbs and knock the top out. John would then fell the remaining stick. It was a win win. I get the practice, John gets the glory.

De-limbing stuff and knocking the top out off things for some reason feels like a rite of passage and when I suggested it, I felt like the time was right for me to check “de-limbed and topped big conifer” off my list of learning experiences. So when I rocked up on a Sunday morning I was raring to go. I got my gear on and “got amongst it”. If you’ve ever watched this kind of thing on being done before, it looks pretty quick. I was expecting the de-limbing and topping of this tree to take me an hour – maximum.

De-limbing a conifer is pretty standard practice. Spikes on, strop/lanyard/flipline1 out and you spike up the tree, removing the limbs as you go. The spikes keep you from falling down and the strop allows you to keep a pressure between you, the spikes and the tree. In other words, it keeps you up. However in order for it to work well, there needs to be two things present. The first, is a nice round trunk free of objects that “catch” the strop as you “flip” it upwards. The second, is a well honed strop technique. It turns out that I had neither. But whilst I was doing it, I thought that I had at least a half decent strop technique.

Watching the video footage back is painful. About five metres up I realised I had left something on the ground. John, my groundie, was assisting some visitors loading timber onto their trailers. So I came down to get the thing I’d left on the ground and then set the camera up to record my ascent on a tripod. A five metre ascent with a rope and lanyard took me nearly four minutes – it probably should take less than 30 seconds. The footage is below if you also wish to be tortured. It’s like watching a new born horse struggling to walk.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not beating myself up. I’m just critically observing and acknowledging that the gap between my actual skill level and my perceived skill level is once again made quite apparent to me. It’s funny how climbing always does this to me. This is what learning is, a function where perceived gains and apparent losses are input into some mysterious algorithm and an increment of new skill is the output.

If you look at the trunk, you can see bumps. These are the branch collars and that’s what my strop was getting caught on. This, and my newbie technique, prevented me from moving the strop up quickly and methodically. So moving up and around the tree took me more time than I had imagined it would. The climbing line worked a treat and I soon figured out it was easier to just ascend up the line and “walk” up the tree where flipping the line was difficult. One I was back up though, I found my groove. Not a very fast groove, but a groove none the less.

I’d put my secondary line on a nice fat branch about one foot above my head and then descend a bit and position myself using the strop and my spikes so that I was nice and comfortable. Then I’d cut everything that was within reach of me. When there was nothing left to cut within reach, I’d move around the stem and cut some more until there was nothing left for me to cut. Then I’d climb up past my secondary line until it was about waist height, using the branches as ladders. I’d find another branch about a foot above my head and move the secondary climbing line and descend back down and start cutting. Rinse and repeat.

I was experiencing a mixture of “loving it” (80%) and “bricking it” (20%). I suspect the more I do this, I can get that bricking it down to a respectable and healthy sub one percent. People who have done this for a while tell me that you need a little bit of bricking it to keep you on your toes and to keep your safety game on point.

To be clear though the “bricking it” thoughts do tend to allow the inner doubt to creep in. “You can’t do this”, “this is not for you”, “you’ll never be good at this” . They’re the usual suspects. You must not give into these thoughts. I tell them “I’ll just finish what I’m doing and then, if I agree with you, I’ll follow your advice”. That usually shuts them up for a few minutes.

I must have been right in the zone because two hours had passed. I had made it about three metres up from where I was in the above photo. However, I was still about three metres from being at a point where I could knock the top out of the tree. The plan was to drop the stem over the pond and make a nice bridge for birds and other creatures to enjoy. If I had simply removed the top where I was then the stem would have ended up being too short to make the bridge. It would have simply been a log in a pond, that we’d probably have to clean up, and we didn’t want that job. So I had more to cut.

Then my fuel ran out. I had to come back down to re-fuel and then I was reminded of the time. It was nearly time to leave the site for the day. So in the end I didn’t get to knock the top out of it - but I did manage to get about three quarters of the limbs off. Here’s a before and after.

I’ll not lie, I was very much looking forward to “riding the stick” when the top came out and ragged me about on the stem, but it was not meant to be. John got the 462 out with the 36” bar and felled that tree right over the pond. It was the last tree to be felled on the site. John got his big tree and I got (nearly) the thing I was after. This is the things about trees - they teach you things about yourself. Every time I’ve worked on a tree I’ve learned at least one thing about the tree and one thing about myself.

On this task I learned that Norway spruce (Picea abies) is very, very sappy (sapier than a teenage girl on valentines day) and is in fact so sappy, that it will lock your climbing system up to the point that descent becomes nearly impossible. What I learned about myself is that I’m on the road to being a competent climber, but there’s still some journey ahead of me. I have to cut myself some slack in this regard as I’m still not technically out of treeschool and so I haven’t really been climbing for any real period of time. If I was writing a report card for myself I’d probably give myself a B minus and the comment would be –

Jamie is an enthusiastic student who clearly has the will to get on and reach his potential. But he often attempts things beyond his current abilities. I want to give him an A for effort, but his desire to take on jobs outside his skill set leaves things undone, so he’s getting an overall B minus being pulled towards an A once he gets a little more practice under his belt and learns the limit of his abilities.

When this tree started growing in the late eighties neither it nor myself had any ideas we’d both learn something from each other. I’m always grateful to trees for this. I only hope it’s grateful to me for having respect in transitioning it from one state of its life to another.

I appreciate your attention.

I appreciate that tree.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Jamie.

The video is below. It is by far my shortest video and probably one that gave me the most fun editing. Apologies if you don’t like Jazz, fugues or accordions.

Thanks for watchin’

I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie,.

Neil has been my friend since the late eighties. We were both skateboarders who lived within a mile of each other in a South Shields – a medium sized coastal town in the North East of England. In the early 2000’s he moved to Thailand and in that time I’ve seen him once. Sadly, Neil’s mother passed at the start of December 2023 and so he and his wife returned to the UK to do all of the things that adults must do when their parents pass away. One of those things is dealing with the estate.

Treework can, on very rare occasions, be surprisingly emotional. One of the things that gets me on jobs at treecompany during jobs for widows, is the reminder that men typically die before women1. There are a lot of jobs that I do at treecompany where a hedge or tree that was planted by a now deceased husband is left unmaintained. It is understandable. If I was widow I can easily see how I’d not want to touch or alter anything my now deceased husband grew and cared for.

The tree

Neil’s garden had a few trees that had been allowed to become outgrown, but one in particular was the target of my saws. A cherry.

Cherry trees, as I have written about before, tend to get very pronounced surface roots. Here the roots became so pronounced that the fence had been removed to accommodate them and it had lifted the concrete slabs up by six inches. I know those slabs used to be level because we used to skate on them back in the day when the cherry tree hadn’t been planted.

Hazards, Zones & Site.

Fibre Optic Line

I didn’t spot from the photo that Neil sent me was the fact that there was a BT fibre optic line running through the trees edge. I’ve worked a few jobs where we’ve had to deal with overhead lines, but always as a groundie. This time I was the climber (and the groundie) and so it was up to me to not break that line. If I did, there’s a minimum charge of £1000 to get it fixed. As this was a freebie good deed for a friend and knowing full well that no good deed goes unpunished, I did not want to break that line.

Every roof surface

All of the buildings in the garden had been roofed with plastic sheeting which was very brittle after being exposed to UV for ten or more years. It was also -5º celcius which didn’t help matters at all. My controls for these hazards were simply “be mindful, accurate and don’t break anything”. My hoop was a bit twitchy.

Drop Zone

This drop zone is the area in which you can drop stuff. This may have been the smallest drop zone I’ve worked on anywhere. It was about one metre wide and all in all and surrounded by fragile roofing and lined on the north boundary by a nice expensive fibre optic line.

It was also a cold day. I was on the coast, up a tree and absolutely feeling the -5º windchill. One bonus however was the view. I could see both the sea and my old childhood bedroom from the top of this tree. I dream about that bedroom at least once every month. Seeing it in real life always increases the frequency of those dreams.

Dismantling the tree

The last time I did a solo dismantle on a cherry tree, I had not started working at treecompany. Since then, I’ve worked on about fifty removals now from the point of view of a groundie. I’m always watching how the climbers do it and I’ve been itching to do a removal of my own for a while, especially on something that required climbing.

Whilst I do now own a nice truck capable of towing a large trailer or chipper, I don’t currently have either a chipper or a trailer. In the last cherry tree job I hacked around this by putting the brash into dumpy bags. I got mocked for this approach at treeschool but hey - a solution is a solution. So, with glee, the plan for this job was to once again to put all of the brash into dumpy bags and mash it up with a saw. Neil was going to take it to the tip.

However, as I turned up at Neil’s place I noticed a guy with an arb truck and chipper doing a hedge. Words were spoken, hands were shaken and we’d managed to upgrade from brash in a dumpy bag, to brash being chipped and taken away. The guy was called Gareth Shepard (or Gaz) and he runs a tree business called NE Tree that operates in and around South Shields. The planets aligned for me and Neil in this regard. I’m not sure Neil understood how much of a bullet he dodged – but I did.

Aside from the tiny drop zone and hazards, this dismantle was actually straight forward. I could access the tree with ease, it was an easy climb and I could use my silky (a handsaw) for nearly every branch cut. I prefer using the silky because it is so peaceful. Small trees like this one are an ideal one to develop your climbing skills because almost straight away you’re anchoring into branches that are on the limit of what you can safely anchor (wrist thickness). You have to pay attention to where and how you’re anchoring and where possible anchor around two more branches. It would be exactly the same at the top of a twenty five metre monster broadleaf, only it would feel less safe because of the distance between you and the ground.

I did have to come down after a while to drag the brash out into the street so that Gaz could chip it, but that’s a small price to pay to get rid of brash. I was then back up and removing branches again. Here’s some video snap shots to give you an idea of the approach. With the exception of one cut, everything was removed with my silky.

Gaz made the day much easier by performing groundie duties. He dragged, chipped and sent me up the stuff I needed. I cannot tell you how much being able to move the brash off site with ease (either by truck or trailer) assists when doing this kind of work. If I’m being honest, it is the most valuable part to a customer. The second most valuable thing we’ll get to a little later on. Before I move on, let me express my gratitude towards Gaz once more - 🙏

So once, you’ve got the branches and limbs off, it is just a case off chopping chunks (we call them chogs in the North East of England - pronounced like chips) off and throwing them down. This act is called “chogging” and you’re aiming to make a stick that is just small enough to fit into the space you have to fell it. This job had a tiny drop zone and felling anything wasn’t on the cards. Every part of the stem had to be chogged.

One thing with chogging is that you’re removing all of the places you could place your feet and for this reason, you would typically always wear spikes when chogging down a stem. However, I made a newbie error on this job and I didn’t bring my climbing spikes. So, I had to do the unthinkable and use a chainsaw from a ladder.

I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking the exact same thing – every fail video on the internet concerning chainsaws and trees would tell you to never to do this. HOWEVER, in my defence I was using the ladder as a positioning device2. My lanyard and ropes had all of my weight. I also made sure to strap the ladder in place so that it couldn’t move. Risk assessment people, risk assessment.

For anyone still thinking this is dodgy, here is what the Arboricultural Association technical guidance one (short name TG1) has to say about using ladders as a platform for work:

Section 7: Strategy for access

…

7.6.3 – Where a ladder is used as a means of providing a temporary platform for work, the climber must be secured to the tree and the ladder secured to stop it moving.

Check and check. Move on people, this use of ladders was completely legit.

The Cleanup

I made mention to the second most valuable thing to a customer regarding tree removal. It is this stage, the cleanup. Tree work is very messy - especially where chainsaws are involved. Not only are there a lot of small little twigs littering the place, but there’s “the heavy” (the collective term for chogs), the chip or brash (Gaz sorted this for me) and then the saw dust. In the above photo you can see the heavy, the twigs and the dust. All of which is in no kind of order.

This is the part of the job I don’t relish but it has to be done. It is in all likelihood the thing that the customer remembers the most about employing you. They expect the treework to be done, but they never expect the mess. They can often get quite shocked when they see how much mess is made. Sometimes they even get quite angry about it. I’ve had a few jobs where the customer has started getting a bit aggressive over the mess. That’s fun. How far you play with the customers anger is down to how many cups of tea and biscuits they’ve served. If they’ve served close zero then you get to have a bit more fun. You never cross the professional line, but you certainly don’t do the same kind of damage control as you would for a customer for whom their tea and coffee game is on point.

So whilst a customer nearly always doesn’t expect the mess, what they’ll notice is how well you clean it up. For them the mess is “a thing that goes wrong” and cleaning it up is “a make good”. This is of course absurd, as the mess is a part of the job but if you don’t tell the customer to expect it (the easy / cowards way out) then this will be the bed you lie in. Fortunately for me, I explained to Neil that I’d be making a hell of a mess and as this was a freebie favour for a friend, I’d clean the worst of it up, but the final cleanup was his. He was fine with this as the entire garden was getting a revamp.

Cleanups are straight forward. First you get your tools away, then you move the heavy and then you blow the dust. Sometimes, you shovel the dust up and put it into dumpy bags and mix it in with the woodchip (don’t tell the tipsite that though). However on this occasion I simply blew it off the path. I was up against time on this as it was getting dark fast as you can see from the below photo.

And that was that. The cherry tree was gone. I got to meet Neil’s wife Kanni for the first time which was a nice treat and I got to have some exceptional conversations with Neil about the world and the concept of freedom. At this point you may be thinking there’s nothing more to write about, but there is.

Hand tools tend to pass from person to person. This is especially true for tools that have belonged to someone who has passed away. The people dealing with the estate often want these tools to go to people who will value them. I am one such person and I have many examples of this, and this removal led to the acquisition of another such item. This time a delightful axe with a wonderful beech handle. I named the axe Mr Skeldon as it belonged to Neil’s father who I remember fondly as a very capable man.

I distinctly being amazed by Neil’s father when we were in our skateboarding phase. Mr Skeldon was an oldschool guy who knew a lot about making stuff. He was the only dad in our group to actually make a deck (the wooden top of a skateboard) for Neil. He made the plywood from veneers, he made the form, he glued the plywood on the form and he made a legit deck. There are not many of these people left in the world and Mr Skeldon was one of them. He passed first, before Mrs Skeldon and the saying that behind every great man is great woman holds credence for me (Hi Jo 💕). And so I’ll wrap up this post by apologising to Mr & Mrs Skeldon for removing their tree but I want them both to know two things. First, that I’m going to take very good care of my new axe – Mr Skeldon. Second, eating baked beans on toast in Neil’s front room whilst watching old skate videos, will forever be etched into my soul as some of the happiest times of my life.

I appreciate your attention.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Jamie.

The other (a birch) had fallen and got hung up on a bunch of mostly dead hazel coppice on the other side of the track. Funnily enough the birch was right next to where the “sketchy birch over a path” was. This doesn’t look too bad in the photo, but that birch tree 100% doesn’t want to survive at 45º for too long. As this track is used frequently by locals who like to enjoy the peaceful nature of the woodland, you cannot leave stuff like this literally “hanging” around. Even though the woodland is private, locals still visit the place and arguing no fault under the Occupiers Liability Act would be an expensive legal process – even with public liability insurance.

So the trees had to be dealt with and whilst I wanted to be down in the woodland mapping and working on the surveying section of my woodland management plan, the universe had other ideas. So whilst these trees were not my trees, they do belong to some of my neighbours – so I did them both a nice christmas solid and I took care of the trees with no invoices issued. The benefits of having a trained forester and arborist as a neighbour.

I didn’t get many photos, but I did take the video camera. It is a shorter than normal video and captures the process of dealing with these kinds of windthrown trees.

This is why I always take a saw to the woodland. I don’t always take the winching gear (it is heavy and pain in the anus to pack and unpack) but if I had not have taken the saw, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything except turn around, drive 40 minutes home and do something else. Probably workshop related as that's a big thing for me at the moment..

Bonus for readers

One thing I didn’t put in the video was that I experimented with creating some laid hedging / fencing using an overstood hazel stool that was at the front of the my woodland. I’m going to go into this in more depth later but we have some on-going issues in the woodland and we’re looking to create natural boundaries to ensure that visitors on horses stay on the bridal ways and that trespassers on motorbikes stay out completely. Not that I have anything against these activities, but they have their place, which for horses is on the bridal way and for motorbikes is “not in the woodland” (it is actually written into the deeds of the purchase as a convenant that you agree not to use the woodland as a motorbike track). I digress…

As part of the natural boundaries, I had an idea. I have lots of hazel along the front of my section of the woodland and I thought that laying the hazel down and then pinning the ends to the ground would create a nice way to get the hazel to regenerate, that over time, would form a nice long natural laid hedge.

This was my first attempt at laying a hedge, and the pleach cuts were horrific. However, the proof of concept is there and I think it looks ace. On the next visit to the woodland I’ll add the stakes to the laid lengths of hazel and peg the ends into the ground to encourage the hazel to take root and start a new stool off. Over time these horizontal lengths will shoot new vertical growth and form a living and vibrant hedge. It’ll look lovely, it’ll keep visitor activities to the bridal path and is excellent habitat for flora and fauna.

More on this later though as hedge laying is something I am very, very interested in. The below video is just as relevant today as it was in 1942. It is an excellent video on the topic.

Thanks for reading and as always, I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie.

Just before Christmas in December of 2023 I was able to be assessed for my “CS32” qualification which in non-treebabblespeak is “being certified competent in felling medium sized trees”. If you’re a self-employed arb professional (which I am now months away from rather than years!) and you want public liability insurance, then this is an essential qualification. My assessment took place in an ash and oak plantation near Chester-le-Street in the North East of England. The ash trees were being felled because they had started to show symptoms of ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) and were of a decent size to be harvested. Better to fell them now before the timber quality is compromised is the logic.

Trees come in sizes?

In the UK, as far as qualifications are concerned - yes trees have sizes. They categorised into small, medium and large. The short version of why this is the case has to do with historical chainsaws. Foresters (not tree surgeons - who are mostly domestic) fell trees all day and when you’re doing this, you want a chainsaw that you can carry around all day that is powerful but not too heavy. Historically this was a saw that could run a 15” bar. Small trees are the ones that a 15” guidebar will go through completely, medium are the ones that a 15” guidebar cannot go through completely and thus require more complex cuts and large trees, rather sensibly, are the ones that prompt the statement “you’re gonna need a bigger bar mate”. The reality of the situation is that in the real world of production felling, you’d use a bigger bar on medium trees so you can work faster. However, in an assessment situation, you use a 15” bar to demonstrate that even with a small bar you have solid skills.

Some photos below demonstrate the different sized bars along with various derpy faces.

However in the reality of production tree felling these sizes don’t really come into it, beyond littleun’ and biggun’. Everything else is a tree.

Felling and processing a tree

Felling a tree is the fun part and it really is thrilling. Sadly, however, it lasts for about 10% of the total time. The other 90% of the time is in processing the tree. If you’re lucky and the tree falls straight to the ground without getting hung up then all you have to do to process the tree is dismantle the crown and crosscut the logs. If you’re unlucky and the tree got hung up as it was falling, then you have to winch it down and then process it. On average these trees took me about forty minutes to fell and process. Only one of my trees got hung up and that was during the assessment, luckily the winching didn’t take long (it normally does).

Here’s a series of photos I took on the felling course as I worked through a danish pie cut. The tree I would estimate to be about 500mm in diameter. Neither a littleun’ or a biggun’; simply “a tree”.

The fun part – felling

First, I always like to have a few words with the tree I am about to fell. I thank it for being a tree and release it from service. I also explain that it is about to become wood. You may think this is crazy, but I think it is polite. I want to be clear – I don’t hug the tree and neither do I cry about the loss. It is a tree, they literally grow on trees and will ultimately be replaced inline with the woodland management plan. Tree gonna tree.

The buttress roots

The first job for you and your saw is to take off the buttress roots so that you have nice log shape. This also makes it easier to reason about felling the tree in terms of predicting how much holding wood you need and the ideal size of the hinges. The buttress roots are the trees natural stabilisers against prevailing winds. However, saw mills want log shaped logs, so you remove them as a first stage as it makes everything easier.

The Face cut

If there is an iconic part of felling a tree it is the face cut. Assuming gravity agrees with you then the face cut will, ideally, be the thing directs the fall direction. If gravity disagrees with you, then you have to convince it with wedges, winches, mechanical assistance and/or skill.

The space I chose for this tree was nice and clear and the posture of the tree in terms of lean or weight wasn’t going to require me to do much convincing. The only downside with this space was that it was directly over a ride. This would make cleanup harder and more time consuming as the resulting arisings would have to be moved off the ride. I could have chosen a different direction, but then I’d have to fell it onto other trees, which means slow moving when processing. Swings and roundabouts, six and two threes etc etc. I chose to fell it over the ride because being able to walk around easily is a nicer way to do things.

Fire up the saw! I could, and probably will, write a lengthy piece about face cuts at some point as they are a world to themselves. Depth, height, angle, humboldt vs conventional, there is a lot. However, in this context, for this tree and this species, we were going for a conventional face cut, about 30% off the width of the tree and aiming for a 45º angle. I am resisting the temptation to unpack that previous sentence. Move on Jamie, move on.

Below you can see that I’ve roughed out a face cut in the direction of felling. You’d not want to fell a tree with this quality of face cut as all those little centimetre imperfections end up being metres or tens of metre errors when you start felling stuff and combining in wind and heavy limbs.

I find the physical world so thrilling because unlike the digital world there’s no undo function. If I remove too much wood by misjudging the size of the face cut and end up with a 50% hinge then I am in a world of pain and suffering. I cannot press cmd/ctrl+z to get out of it. So we move with caution and rough things but with confidence so we’re productive with time. “Shit or get off the pot” is a poignant expression.

Once I was happy with the dimensions, it was time to tidy the face cut up. It must be nice and clean, ensuring that the back of the face cut is straight and that there are no dutchmen (little cuts that extend beyond the back of the face cut). Dutchmen can ruin your day causing trees to fall in unpredictable and dangerous ways.

In the below photo you can see the 30% width of the face cut. You can also see that I’ve left a little bit of buttress root on the back. I left this because the tree was leaning in the direction of felling and that buttress root was ideal holding wood that wouldn’t affect the shape of the final log too much. Yes, the sawmill may have preferred it was not there, but my safety trumps their specs. By leaving this holding wood, especially on ash that is very “splitty”, I gave myself a nice insurance policy against “barber chairing”

The backcut - danish pie cut.

In the assessment we had to demonstrate knowledge of two backcuts. The “danish pie cut” and the “chase the hinge” backcut. Resisting once again the temptation to unpack in great detail why you’d choose one over the other along with all of the other options you have, I will simply say that I chose the danish pie cut for this tree as it is an ideal choice for when the tree is leaning towards (as this tree was) or away from the direction of felling.

It is a fairly complex cut and requires that your saw skills are beyond the beginner stage as things have to line up, there’s a lot of boring and if you don’t have a nice sharp chain, then you’re in for a world of pain. However, there is a reasonable error tolerance if you don’t get your cuts lined up perfectly.

Remember – as this was an assessment, I had to use a 15” bar. If this was not an assessment, I’d have used a 24” bar and used a “bore and hold” technique. However, a 15” bar was what I had to use so danish pie cut was the order of the day.

The short version of a pie cut is that you strategically remove supporting wood from the base of the tree. This allows you to manipulate the tree with wedges whilst leaving just enough so that you have a small, easy to sever area when the tree is ready to “send”.

Here’s the steps in detail.

Fanning the hinge

Bore into your face cut and remove the central column of hinge wood. You want to remove about 50-60% of the width of the tree with 20-25% hinge left on either side. This particular bore is the hardest because you’re going into freshly exposed cross grain timber at an angle and this does make the process of boring subject to a fair bit of kickback. It is not for the faint of heart or those who are easily irritated.

Once you’re bored in, the bar goes in all the way. You’ll notice that you go in about one inch above the top of the hinge. This is to give the saw clearance space from the bottom of the face cut. Ideally, this bore cut should be parallel to the bottom of the face cut.

Here’s more descriptive video I put together to show how this fanning interacts with the holding wood on the tree. I couldn’t resist putting my very, very small chainsaw to use.

Once you’re done fanning, you’re ready to start removing wood from the back of the tree.

Backcut 1

Another bore cut, only this time bore into the side with the weight, making sure not to blow out your hinge and ensuring you leave 10% hinge. This tree looks like it has less hinge, but as you will see when the tree is down, it was actually more than 10%.

You want to bore into the tree and then bring your guidebar back towards the holding wood at the back of the tree. You want to ensure that you’re not cutting away more than 50% of the holding wood and you also want to ensure that your cut is at the same height that you fanned out the hinge.

Once you’ve came back all the way and the saw is out you want to insert a wedge. We had a fancy pants power wedge on the day of our course and so I used that.

Here’s another video example. Obviously the wedges go in after you’re done sawin’

The wedge at the very back is optional if the tree is leaning in the direction you want to fell it. However, if it isn’t, you’re best putting the wedge in - especially if it is leaning opposite to how you want to fell it. You can also stop on this once you’re ready to get that side wedge in. This is useful if the tree is leaning into the side you’re cutting away. You absolutely don’t want to allow the tree to sit down on your bar and this side wedge prevents that.

As you can see from the video at this point there is not a lot of wood left, but just like a solid JML commercial, there’s more…

Back cut 2

Nearly there - the penultimate cut - a bore cut, only this time from the other side. Again, your fanned hinge and bore cut from the other side should line up. If they do line up you can feel it in the saw, there’s less resistance. This time, however, you pull your saw out leaving about 25% of the tree as holding wood. At this point the tree is being held up on the two sections of hinge, and this 25% section of holding wood at the back.

Here’s the final diagram video thing to show how all of the cuts combine to leave the two sections of hinge and the final holding corner. The danish pie cut isn’t rocket engineering, but it has a few moving parts. The pie cut is also known as the “safe corner” due to the fact that it leaves a safe corner strap that is solid enough to hold a tree, but small enough to quickly send it and get out of there.

One of the things about the danish pie cut is that you can use it for trees leaning into and against the direction that you want to fell them. When doing this tree, it was leaning into the direction of travel so I didn’t have to do any work with the wedges. The only wedge I inserted was an insurance policy that I’d never have needed but this was an assessment, so I had to use one. It would be in using these wedges that I’d manipulate the trees posture to move it into a position where the weight was over the face cut…

…and then…

The moment you’re waiting for – send it

Then you fire up your saw and sever the holding wood on the corner, send the tree and allow the hinge to do it’s work.

When the tree starts moving you get the f**k of out of dodge via your escape routes and you keep your attention up and forward - watching out for stuff flying back towards you. Check the end of the below video for a very tame example of tree shrapnel, it wouldn’t have harmed me, but it was a good “warning shot”. To get to this moment took me about eight minutes. Totally worth it.

Once everything is down and you’re certain there’s no hangers, and everything that should be on the ground, is on the ground then and only then you can admire your handywork. How did I do? The hinge is a bit bigger on one side than the other, and whilst the bore cuts are not flush, everything worked as expected - especially with the hinge. The larger hinge on the far side meant that my bore cuts were not parallel to the face cut. In this situation it didn’t matter as I had space for some deviation in falling direction, but in a situation where space is tight this could have got my tree hung up.

Just like other topics, you could devote an entire book to hinges and their purpose. I’ll spare you that but the one thing you need to understand about hinges are that they ultimately decide how, and where, the tree will fall. The face cut doesn’t really affect direction, the main purpose of the face cut is to give the tree space to fall.

As the tree falls the fibres that make up the hinge are pulled by the weight of the tree. This is what makes that creaking sound when trees fall. As the fibres are stretched there comes a point at which they break and if the hinge has done it’s job because you’ve correctly done your cut work, then it’ll act as a launcher for the tree before finally handing it over to gravity. It really is fascinating and whilst it’s easy to glance over the maths and science on it, there’s a tonne going on. This is why I have absolute respect for people who have done this for years and have developed an intuitive sense of felling trees. These are smart people.

Everything up to this part was about eight minutes of high rate heart beat adrenaline based fun. But, the piper must always be paid and this piper demands the tree is processed into the site specification.

The hard part - processing

Next is the processing of the felled tree. This takes longer than felling and is mostly composed of a high heart rate. Rather than adrenaline causing the increased heart rate this time it is due to physical work. If felling a tree is the 100m sprint then the processing of the tree is the 800m race. If you’ve ever done athletics, you’ll know how vile 800m events are. As fast as you can, at high effort for a period that never seems to end. Same with processing a tree. When felling trees you may be paid by the tonne and this means maximising the amount of trees you can work in a day, or you may be on a day rate for a set amount of days. Either way, there’s no time for dawdling and admiring the scenery. You have to crack on.

There’s always a site specification for trees and you must process the tree to this specification. In this case it was 3m logs and brash mats for the arisings. With broadleaf trees you generally want to start off from the crown and work towards the trunk. This is because unlike conifers, broadleaves tend to have very broad canopies that are weighted over multiple limbs. Working in this way allows you to quickly nibble away at the various limbs without having to worry about a heavy limb crushing you or breaking a leg or arm. You cannot just start cutting big limbs off willy-nilly. They’ll roll on you, seesaw up into your head and generally create danger filled calamity. So you work from the tip downwards. Conifers however tend to have a central stem and you can work from the base of the trunk upwards without such concerns.

Below you can see a photo of the tree half processed. Notice how the limbs on the right hand side form a real world kerplunk situation? That’s what you have to unpick. On the left side you can see the resulting brash mat.

A brash mat specification mean that you cut the arisings (aka branches and twigs) up to a point where they form a covering on the ground. A brash mat should not resemble a pile, it should form a level covering with nothing obviously pointing upwards. Done correctly you should be able to walk over a brash mat and it should awful, vile, hard work. I get the feeling brash mats are the preferred deterrent against the youth who like to find areas to hang out. You’d not want to spend time walking on a brash mat if there was an alternative. Having said that brash mats are also excellent habitat for small mammals, birds, detritivores and other woodland inhabitants.

Once you’re done processing the crown you move onto cutting the logs. Unsurprisingly, this is also hard work. It often isn’t possible to cut through “in a one-er” and so you have to roll the log using a felling lever or cant hook. With medium trees you are right on the cusp of what a felling lever or cant hook can move and you need to be careful that the lever doesn’t come back at you and smash your face up. I didn’t get any footage of me rolling this one with the felling lever, but it wasn’t easy at all. To give you an idea of rolling logs, here’s a little snippet of footage I captured down at treedom woods a few days ago as I was clearing up some windfall on the neighbouring woodlands (and also hello to any locals who happen to be reading - nice to have you onboard!)

Once you’re done cutting the logs up and any brash piles have been mashed down, you’re done and you can move onto the next tree. If you wanted to start a business where people come to work out in a woodland, then processing a tree could be branded as “forest fit”. It really is phenomenally hard work, but it is also phenomenally good fun. I’ll never get bored of hearing and feeling the sound of a tree falling to the ground. Your feet feel the tremble and the sound is like an explosion. There’s something primal about it all.

The tree I felled in that I featured above didn’t make that good of a sound, so I will wrap this up with a tree that John felled. I’ve worked with John before on “a birch on a birch on an oak in an oak” and I’ll also be doing some work for him on a job he has on. More on that later, but for now enjoy John felling something about the 650mm mark. I especially like his “don’t you get hung up on me tree command” at the 12 second mark.

This has been a big one so I will wrap it up. Felling bigger trees is easier in some respects and harder in others. Easier because they tend to have more weight and have less chance of hanging up, and harder because every thing is scaled up - danger, cut sizes and damage to name a few. There are many different techniques to use and I’ve only mentioned one. In a different context I’d probably use a different technique (and a bigger bar). However, I’m just over a year and half into the Life of Treedom thing and that’s also getting scaled up. Exciting times ahead for 2024.

Thanks for your attention – I appreciate it.

Cheers,

Jamie

p.s - Happy New Year!

The actual name of the qualification I am “doing” at treeschool1 is “City & Guilds Level 3 Advanced Technical Diploma in Arboriculture & Forestry” but we call it “L3 arb”. In the UK, “arb” is the shorthand term that we use for “tree surgery”. The course covers everything from soil and plant science, tree planting, forestry operations, chainsaws, felling trees, woodland management, climbing trees, pruning trees on the ground, aerial pruning, dismantling trees, estate skills, hedge laying, specialist machinery, work experience, plant pest & diseases, tree identification, trees and the law, and of course, the obligatory health and safety unit. The only thing it doesn’t cover is reversing small towed things on vans and pickups – I wish it did.

By the time the L3 Arb course finishes up in May of 2024, I hope to have attained the qualification and suitable verified knowledge, a drip of wisdom and good few dollops of experience in all of the above topics. In some ways my knowledge and “let me at it attitude” makes me ready for industry and in other ways the fact that I’ll have more knowledge than experience makes me a liability.

Tickets

There’s an add-on qualification that we do alongside our course which industry calls “tickets”. Truthfully, industry only cares about tickets. Few employers care about qualifications such as L3 arb and most seem to prefer people with tickets. I suspect it is because it makes their public liability insurance premiums easier to calculate. Insurance is a theme.

In the UK we have two organisations that issue “tickets”. There’s NPTC (National Proficiency Tests Council) and LANTRA (land + training) and whilst there’s some differences between the two, they are generally the same format. A ticket involves some training and then an assessment. The training is practical and happens over a day or two. There is always accompanying theory which you have to learn (or memorise like your lines in a performance – my strategy). The assessment takes place on the day after your practical training. It assesses both your practical knowledge and your theoretical knowledge. If you pass, you get the ticket, if you fail you don’t. People do fail tickets, but generally speaking it takes more effort to fail than it does to pass.

At the time of writing, I have eight tickets (although one is still processing due to Christmas).

1. Chainsaw maintenance & crosscutting (CS30)

2. Felling small trees up to 380mm (CS31)

3. Felling medium trees (380mm - 760mm) (CS32) (processing)

4. Climbing and Aerial rescue (CS38)

5. Chainsaw from a rope and harness (CS39)

6. Individual windfallen trees

7. Chipper

8. Basic tractor skills

No Qualifications

In the UK there are many fine, very skilled tree workers who essentially had no formal training or qualifications. If they did get tickets then they did so on their companies dime and only because they had to. One example that springs to mind is Reg Coates, a dude from somewhere around Cheshire who now lives and works in Canada. It isn’t a clearly stated legal requirement that you have tickets or qualifications to do treework in the UK. It is implied that you do via various bits of legislation such as PUWER, LOLER, Health & Safety at Work Act etc etc. Legislation uses terms such as “competent” and “trained” which are not clearly defined. Any suitably skilled law-monger could argue the case that “a decade(s) of experience” met the concept of competent and trained. “Qualified”, however, is a binary situation. You either have the qualifications or you don’t.

If you have no qualifications, you’re going to have a very hard time getting public liability insurance if you want to run your own business. If you just wanted to work for someone else and thought you could fly under the radar then think again. One of the first things that any reputable employer should do is ask for a copy of your tickets for their insurances. If they don’t ask, then you might want to consider who you’re working for.

The bottom line is that if you want decent work in the UK you need to have qualifications or tickets. If you don’t then you won’t be able to get that public liability insurance. Then you’ll be stuck pollarding butchering the trees of unsuspecting punters who just wanted their tree to be a bit smaller.

Tickets vs L3 Arb

So why bother doing L3 arb if all that is really needed are the tickets?

The most obvious answer is that you don’t need do L3 arb. There are plenty of “accelerated learning” courses that happen over 12 weeks that go from chainsaw maintenance and small felling all the way through to aerial rescue and chainsaw from a rope and harness. Depending on the person this could be a great route to go down. You only need 12 weeks of not earning a wage before you’re in a position start earning as a tree surgeon. The reason I didn’t go down this path was experience. You don’t get any actual experience on this route. You go from training to working with zero experience. I didn’t want to do that.

Another route I could have explored was doing the basic tickets (chainsaw maintenance + crosscutting and felling small trees) and then working as a tree surgeon and over time working on my tickets. I could have even done this in conjunction with treeschool as an apprenticeship. I’d have just needed a business to work for who’d sponsor me and I’d be earning and getting experience from day one. I didn’t go down this route for two reasons. One, because I didn’t know it was a route until I was already doing L3 arb and secondly, I’d have just been swapping one full time job (tech) for another (arb) and that’s not a Life of Treedom. That’s a job. Granted it is a job working on trees everyday2 but it is ultimately a job. I’d be doing whatever I was told to do on a day to day basis which isn’t what I signed up for. I have always been clear that I’d be working for myself in my own company.

Fortunately, I was in a position to save up some runway cash for my career switch. This meant I didn’t have to earn straight away and I could take my time to introduce a wage over the two years of the L3 arb course. The reason I took these two years to do the L3 arb course was experience. Obviously there’s the classroom and learning experiences where I’m free of the constraints of production work (get to and complete as many jobs in a day as you can) but there’s also the work experience. This gives me a little modest income into the business to fatten the war chest but it also lets me experience first hand what it is like to be a member of a domestic arb team. It is invaluable and I’m extremely grateful to treecompany3 for this.

But there’s another dimension to experience and one that I’ll wrap up this little dry written piece with and that’s the experience of being around various industry people, interacting with them and exploring the opportunities that come with that.

I’ve met people doing tickets who’ve worked with me. For example when I cleared up the “birch on a birch on an oak in an oak” I worked with John whom I met on my individual windfall ticket. I’ll be doing some work for John shortly, clear-felling a PAWS (plantation on ancient woodland) site so that it can be re-planted with native broadleaves. There’s more examples of this but that’s a different story for another day.

Qualifications, tickets and experience are all important facets of learning a new trade. The exact mixture or route through them all being dependant on the person. I chose my route by chance as it presented itself out of nowhere and was the path of least resistance. I can do this, as I like to throw caution to the wind, plus I put myself in a situation where I didn’t have to start earning straight away. I also didn’t have a clear idea of where I was going – I just knew how I wanted to get there. Now as I draw closer to the end of the course I can start to see some destinations firming up. If I’d focused on qualifications or tickets only, I doubt I’d be at this point, but the truth is I’ll never know. But I do know that qualifications and tickets are where my experiences are coming from.

Then the woodworking developed into a thing 2018-ish and that space had to be dedicated to woodwork and a gym. The squat rack went and instead I got some squat stands. You do what you must to get two uses out of a space.

Then lockdown happens, you inherit a tonne of 24mm baltic birch, ikea desktops (used as facing on insulated walls) and start filling the space up with machines and tools. You also start building cabinets without thinking too much about why, or what for. This is not negligence, you have no experience and you’re on a creative streak.

Then you start running out of space and you look up and see all that spare space. So you do what anyone does - you put the space to use.

So you install a mezzanine floor and practice your timber framing skills.

Eventually you work your way backwards towards the garage door and create a nice internal space. But you start to feel the tension between the two uses of workshop and gym. Things don’t fit next to each other anymore and weight plates and squat stands start to gather distance.

So you bury your head in the sand and build more cabinets

Which turn out great, because these ones had some thought, but they never seem to get finished… with doors (a theme)

You then use the space for a few years and work out all the kinks and it’s working and you’re pleased. Even if you don’t finish the doors.

Then you buy a woodland and the chainsaws and other tools start creeping in. Not a problem, you think laterally.

But then every day you seem to be managing situations like below. You have to move everything from A > B in order to get to your screws.

Now your workshop is for chopping logs, woodworking, a gym, woodland tool storage, and now that you’ve decided to retrain as a tree surgeon, is now also a store for your climbing gear as well as for storing the ingress of scavenged wood.

When you do squats you’re now face to face with chisels and constantly knocking methylated spirits off the shelf behind you when you squat to the correct depth (below parallel)

And then one day, even though a part of you doesn’t want to acknowledge it, you realise upon returning home that the gym, workshop, tool storage, chainsaw maintenance, climbing equipment storage and maintenance, drum kit storage and general dumping group means that eventually, you acknowledge you have a problem.

And the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. The problem I have is that one small space cannot be multiple things.

So I’m going back to basics and starting with a blank wall.

This space is a workshop for woodworking, secure storage of tools and maintenance of those tools.

Watch me make it happen.