• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Some promising sounding news

We have a lot of dieback around here and it’s ravaged most of the trees, I made a post a few years ago about felling a few of the ones that we had because they were beginning to become unsafe.

Interestingly, the healthiest ash tree we have was poisoned about a decade ago and when a decent amount of kerosene had leaked out of a tank into the ground around the tree and I assume it contaminated the roots. For a year it didn’t leaf at all, which we thought it was gone, then the year after it did leaf but much later in the year. It still leafs slower than all the other trees but there are no signs of dieback whatsoever and when it’s fully in leaf it looks very healthy.

I’m not advocating kerosene poisoning is the solution, but it is very unusual especially as it’s the only healthy tree in the area. Perhaps the poisoning gave it some resistance to other infections? Or the fact that the kerosene contaminated the roots it now works harder to pull water from the ground which is what the dieback fungus usually inhibits?
 
Growing up, we had an oldapple tree in the garden. It contracted a fungal disease and we thought it had died however, my dad soaked the trunk with old creosote he had lying about and the tree grew with renewed vigour for years after that.
 
I was beginning to have the same non scientific thought. There is definitely evidence round here of resistance in trees and saplings around us.
 
Hence none scientific. To me it is just Darwin at work.
A few years ago the press was predicting the end of Ash trees. Now they recover from the “ashes”
 
SamQ aka Ah! Q! said:
You do realise you've just contradicted yourself?
Click to expand...
No
The reference to none scientific was back to my first post in this thread. Namely that as I walked around this spring I noticed ash trees recovering and some saplings thriving whilst others were being attacked. I gave it no more thought than that’s evolution in action. A scientific approach in my view would require a bit of rigour and observing whether the saplings were from the same tree or different trees and then infecting them with the fungus to see what happens. Darwin spent his life carefully observing such matters and educated the world by his findings. I do not see that a basic understanding of Darwinism makes my observations a scientific experiment.
 
Your dichotomy of 'experient vs observation' clarifys things. I agree, an observation!
Confusingly, Darwin's writings (early ecology and evolutio) are almost entirely observational, yet he is widely credited as a scientist because said recorded observations enabled later science!
 
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