One of the aspects that I appreciate of working regionally is that it allows you to revisit the same trees over a long period of time.
Recently we returned to a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera), that we have had the privilege of working on for the past twenty years (the large tree to the left of the blue and white house in the image above). Of course on an arboreal time scale, this is a mere blink of an eye – yet it does enable you to gain an understanding of the way in which the work you perform on the tree affects it: You can observe how cuts you made callous over, how the tree responds to pruning, how limb failures are compensated for etc.
But naturally, it is not only the tree that changes over time, the way in which we work also changes.
The first time I was there, which must have been during my training, so sometime early nineties, we were accessing the tree with a long two-part aluminium ladder that we would run up to about ten meters and then proceed to climb from there. Then came throwlines and access systems, treeMOTION, Hitch Climber and so on… in many ways, the tree is the constant, with everything else changing around it.
The pic on the left must have been taken about 1998, the one on the right around 2006…
Apart from anything else, on top of all this, you get the benefit of cracking views – days like this feel a bit like winning.
