I've only seen one Leylandii root plate failure and that was in the
bad gales in 2007 and due to the soil being waterlogged, thus losing
it's cohesive strength. So I would have thought on well drained soils
it is windfirm.
I would say almost certainly! For some reason I have formed the view
that Leylandii are notably windfirm, although they shed canopy from
tight forks where those exist. I'm not sure that height in itself
makes a tree, even a Leylandii, unstable.
-----Original Message-----
From: Moray Simpson <moray.arb@xxxxxxxxxxx.com>
To: UK Tree Care <uktc@xxxxxx.tree-care.info>
Sent: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 9:17
Subject: Re: Highways Act s154 notive appeal
I've seen a few fail on the same site, all were due to girdling roots, which
I put down to their being pot-bound. And I think that I'd be more concerned
at the new growth breaking out from "topping points," although I've seen
older unions fail where it appeared that the dense growth from topping made
the weight intolerable. However I accept this may be to do with many other
factors related to the way they get treated by society in general. My crew
took down a 22m tall beauty the other week, the owners had spent may years
being averse to any sort of pruning or topping, and despite it being a
relatively solitary specimen (not a lot of shelter) there was no sign of any
failed unions.
Making the case that they were dangerous would be difficult I'd imagine, for
the reasons Edmund and Moray state, but making the case that they were a
nuisance in that they were causing infrastructure damage, I'd have thought
was shoe-in.
Jim Q and others have mentioned cases where appeals have been lost on the
grounds that the (presumably non-arb) appellants have claimed trees were
dangerous when they weren't, despite the fact that trees were also clearly
undeserving of TPO protection. Dave Dowson used to recount a case where he'd
been to Court with a bloke who'd been accused of killing a TPO tree when it
was clearly still alive. The fact that he'd made such a bo11ocks of pruning
it that the tree had lost any sort of amenity value didn't come into it. He
got off.
The devil it seems is in the detail. From what we can gather from Paul's
precis of his case he'd be as well to scrap it and start again. Unless it
turned out that Highways had resurfaced the path after hacking all the roots
off, thus leaving the trees dangerous due to compromised roots.
Bill.
http://www.arborcentre.co.uk/
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