• ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝OP
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      21 year ago

      My Dad’s favourite quote from his years of teaching was something a parent said about their teenage son “at that age, they’re all balls and no brains”.

    • Bernie Ecclestoned
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      1 year ago

      If it’s a climate protest, I approve.

      It’s a sycamore, they can be coppiced tf. They grow like weeds.

      It’s got the media’s attention but spoiled a few tourist photos, big deal.

      If people are outraged over one tree, they really don’t have a grip of the situation.

        • Bernie Ecclestoned
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          1 year ago

          We’re destroying the environment, what’s the difference? This has got more attention than throwing paint about and stopping workers from getting to work.

          Plus, the tree will be fine. No harm, no foul.

      • Hogger85b
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        11 year ago

        I actually wondered if it was the landowner fed up with the tiktok selfie set tramping the land, I bet the thousands of tourists feet have scared the land, doing more damage.

    • tal
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      41 year ago

      Or a contemporary of Stonehenge’s builders.

      https://aeon.co/essays/who-chopped-down-britains-ancient-forests

      Much of England had been cleared as early as 1000 BCE, some two millennia beforehand. The Bronze Age saw intensive farming on a scale that we are only just beginning to appreciate. As Oliver Rackham puts it in The History of the Countryside:

      It can no longer be maintained, as used to be supposed even 20 years ago, that Roman Britain was a frontier province, with boundless wild woods surrounding occasional precarious clearings on the best land. On the contrary, even in supposedly backward counties such as Essex, villa abutted on villa for mile after mile, and most of the gaps were filled by small towns and the lands of British farmsteads.

      Rackham describes the immense clearance undertaken during the Bronze Age, boldly claiming that ‘to convert millions of acres of wildwood into farmland was unquestionably the greatest achievement of any of our ancestors’. He reminds us how difficult it was to clear the woodland, as most British species are difficult to kill: they will not burn and they grow again after felling. Moreover, in his dry phrase, ‘a log of more than 10 inches in diameter is almost fireproof and is a most uncooperative object’. The one exception was pine, which burns well and, perhaps as a consequence, disappeared almost completely from southern Britain, the presumption being that prehistoric man could easily burn the trees where they stood: the image of pine trees burning like beacons across the countryside is a strong one.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      They’re building some new houses round my way.

      Annoyed me that they chopped down a bunch of trees for them, and worse the trees would have been in the gardens. Now they’ll just have a featureless, badly laid lawn and a wonky new build fence to look at instead.

      • GreatAlbatrossM
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        31 year ago

        Trees, especially thirsty ones, cause issues with foundations. The issues are not insurmountable, but they are expensive.
        Developers, looking to maximize profit, far prefer removing the trees if they can.

  • tal
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    21 year ago

    General manager Andrew Poad said the sycamore had been “an important and iconic feature in the landscape for nearly 200 years”.

    Well, Robin Hood was supposed to have been running around in the 12th century, so I suppose it was a bit ahistorical in the context of the guy anyway.

    Maybe have the little lumberjack go up and try his hand at being an arborist and plant some new sycamores along the wall for future generations.

    EDIT: If they move quickly on it, I imagine that they could probably use cuttings from the existing tree.

    EDIT2: Yup, apparently it works with cuttings:

    https://hort.ifas.ufl.edu/database/lppi/sp012.shtml

    Acer pseudoplatanus

    Primary method of propagation: seed
    Alternate propagation method(s): cutting, grafting/budding

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝OP
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      61 year ago

      Well, Robin Hood was supposed to have been running around in the 12th century, so I suppose it was a bit ahistorical in the context of the guy anyway.

      I think it’s called the Robin Hood Tree because it was in a Robin Hood film.

      If they move quickly on it, I imagine that they could probably use cuttings from the existing tree

      That’d be a nice touch, from one tree dozens could spring up. Seems fitting.

      • tal
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        11 year ago

        I think it’s called the Robin Hood Tree because it was in a Robin Hood film.

        Yeah, but the movie was presumably filmed there because they were looking for something that didn’t have houses or whatnot in view, looked like it did during the time of Richard Lionheart.

          • tal
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            -11 year ago

            I mean, that’s probably part of it too, but I also feel like they wouldn’t have filmed the scene at Canary Wharf.

            Honestly, given that Robin Hood’s home was Sherwood Forest, Sycamore Gap is about…checks Google Maps…about 172 miles by (modern day) road out of the way, too.

            EDIT: Hmm. Apparently, Acer pseudoplatanus also didn’t grow in Britain at the time Robin Hood was supposed to be running around, either – it was introduced from central Europe, probably significantly later:

            https://gabrielhemery.com/native-trees-of-britain/

            Some trees introduced a long time ago to Britain are now considered ‘naturalised’. There is a specific term for species present since 1500; an ‘archaeophyte’. Such species include beech (native only to south-eastern Britain), horse chestnut, sweet chestnut, sycamore and walnut.

            https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/trees-and-shrubs/sycamore

            It was introduced into the UK from Europe sometime in the 15th or 16th century, and has become naturalised since, as well as being widely planted.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝OP
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      21 year ago

      “scratter” new word filed away for future use.

      It seemed to me to be quite a good cut - he may have worked in the family tree surgery business or…

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      Yeah, I’ve never cut down a tree, but even with a chainsaw, that looks like a big tree for a 16 year old to cut down on his own.

      • @butterflyattack
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        21 year ago

        I’ve cut down (dead) trees. This is a job that could be done by one experienced person but I wouldn’t tackle it on my own - it’s an isolated area and if something goes wrong you are fucked. Trees are fuckin heavy and if one falls on you, you’ll know about it. I don’t know where the 16 year old would have got the experience to tackle this, the cuts look reasonably competent. It would also have taken a fairly long blade chainsaw, though it’s hard to judge the thickness of the stump. Also, what a wanker.