The mountain hare (Lepus timidus) is native to England. Brown hare (Lepus europaeus) was introduced.
357 karma · joined March 19, 2011
When your renter informs you of the boiler breaking, or a roof needs replacing, that's going to get thorny - "It was fine when I was using it/living in it, did you break it?"
Perhaps the latest round of updates to property law for renters come along and suddenly as a landlord you have to above and beyond what you need to as an owner; you both have to do X, Y or Z to your properties because they're rental and not a basic owner situation.
There's three scenarios that come to mind in which it's somewhere between "acceptable" and "totally fine for some reason".
One, it's conifer hedge (the types popular in the UK) as these typically respond very well to being topped. It's what makes them a nice tidy hedge. I'm specifically referring to hedges above 3 meters in height. If you ever worked a hedge like this you'll quickly realise the topped stems are the platform to work off. These hedges can be maintained like this for years. For some reason, topped hedges are completely fine with being topped.
Two, it's either topping or removing. Arguably neither is ideal, but some retention is better than no retention. Topping puts the tree on senescence pathway and gives the ecology time to transition from alive to dead and dying. Whereas removal just makes the local fauna get confused about where the tree went.
Three, veteranisation in woodland settings. If there's a distinct lack of standing deadwood and age variation in a population of species in a given woodland NVC type, the topping and verteranising could be a positive management approach on a sample of trees.
This advice is very specific to the UK and especially on point three to the NVC woodland types. Generally though, prune properly at the correct locations, using proper technique being mindful of the structural loads and balancing of the tree. Topping generally, "because reasons" isn't an ideal approach at all.
Really cool house, but describing the cabinets as "bunch of wood, cut into fairly large pieces. Maybe a few screws and hinges" shows little understanding of what goes into building something like that.
It's hard to tell from the pics if the cabinets are made of sheet goods with veneer or solid boards glued into panels. But at the very least, the trees need to be grown, they need to be managed, they need to be felled, sent to processing for sheet goods, dried and milled for solid wood. Even then you've got to get everything cut to size and square, then build the cabinets with all the specific sizes, then finish them, transport to site and install everything and the trim.
It's two ends of the manufacturing scale. For transistors, you've got mass production at an impossibly difficult level of accuracy for a human and for cabinets you've got single production (at the install level) at very difficult level for a human.
But again, very, very cool house. I especially like the cat doors but not nearly half as much as I imagine the cat does.
As long as there's evidence that work meets quality gates for any required customer audits, and your customers are happy and in the loop that AI is a thing that may or may not be used to produce the service, then those engineers that want it can have it and those that don't, don't.
Feels like a revision to an SDLC rather than a new one. Without seeing the SDLC it's hard to find common ground though. It really depends on how it's written and implemented and of course: culture. In the example we're working from sounds like the tools are being forced on people, and that's less infosec, SDLC and more unbearably bad leadership.
In in total agreement with you though, forcing tools on employees is very dumb and is terrible leadership. Ask your people what they need to be optimally exceptional and go get them it. Then let them get on with it.
With a few narrow exceptions most timber crops in the the UK are monocultures or very limited mixes of pines/spruces/firs which outside of nesting season support very limited ecosystem. Even then the management plan for the site would have to account for species present and respond accordingly. Badgers? 20m no go zone from their sett and it may involve another license from Natural England.
I tend to operate at the border of woodland management and forestry. Coppicing typically tends to fall into the woodland management category due to the smaller scale nature of it, especially for when it is for "green woodworking" or craft use. The larger scale biomass coppice sites are very firmly in the forestry size, but still retain the ecological benefits to an extent.
[0]: https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/research/continuous-cover-...
I was tinkering with making websites for the band I was in (learned html through htmlgoodies.com) but I needed a contact form. I'd never really touched a computer before and I expected formmail to be some wall of incomprehensible binary. I was amazed when I opened it and found plain english.
It was the moment I stopped being a drummer and started being a web developer. That was 1999. I've never stopped writing code since.
Magical.
https://web.archive.org/web/19990302022344/http://www.htmlgo...
My guess would be that the bio-diversity net gain calculations put the ecological investment off-site where it was more practical.
It's a shame though as trees and architecture can happily co-exist with each other. Living walls and well kept green areas are entirely possible.
Mind you, wars and sheep did have a pretty devastating effect on the Caledonian woodland cover of the highlands. The current population of the red deer aren't helping with natural regeneration. This is one of the reasons for the case for re-introducing predator species.
But that's a complex topic with no simple answers and easy divisions.
Here's a map of the canopy data.
Clicking once into Canon street towards those trees presents me with the trees. They're now in leaf and look like Sorbus intermedia "swedish whitebeam" and the key id is the margin on the leaf and the green fruits. Photo was taken July/August as prior to that they're in the flowering phase (beautiful to see btw).
When I spin the view down Canon street I see three mature trees in full leaf on pavements / sidewalks.
As I said in another reply, I'm an arborist and I'm hardwired to see trees and perhaps I subconsciously avoid areas that have none, so maybe that's bias on my part.
I'm nearly always on foot. Perhaps it's just because I'm also an arborist and I'm hard wired to see trees and avoid places that don't have them?
The token tree thing is a problem. Daisy Barrington was part of webinar on the topic as part of the Arboricultural Associations webinar series [0]. Rarely do the species planted get based on local ecology and or have a solid aftercare plan. They're normally chosen for immediate aesthetic look (Paper / Himalayan birch being the most common) rather than how they'd exist over time.
In short birch being a pioneer species is short lived (80 years), grows fast towards light and dislikes being pruned. Where as oaks, norway maple, London planes ( some of which are "climax species") etc live for longer, grow slower and respond to pruning better, support local ecology better and some don't mind the pollution of an urban environment so much.
https://jamiecurle.com/posts/trees-3-30-300
Northumberland, UK.
If you're in the very new, constantly rebuilt, concrete jungle that is the very small part of the city, then OK, greenery is going to be hard to spot. Particularly as they tend to nearly always choose the wrong species to plant and aftercare is an afterthought. But your assessment is factually incorrect.
See for yourself. Go to Google maps, drop a good few street view randomly around the city and you'll see that more often than not you'll see trees.
Also, I have a networks in arboriculture who work in the city and they're never short on work.
I'm not doubting your experience of unease or a concrete/glass wasteland (that's yours and not mine to question) but the facts don't support the statement of no random trees on pavements (side walks).
I live in the North, but I'm often in London.
I also like to go back to books. I cannot do that with the O'Reilly platform when a subscription ends.
I hear you and agree on the unlicensed training point - it is a form piracy.
It's a very enjoyable craft. Last year I planted up about 600 metres of new hedge that should be ready for me to lay in about ten years.
You'd make no friends doing it, but as I understand it, for those that have GDPR as a statutory right then under "[Article 22 - Automated individual decision-making, including profiling][0]" you can request to know if your CV was screened by AI and what (and this is key) "meaningful human interaction" led to that decision. Technically this falls under a data subject access request and so a response is mandatory (but who really is going to enforce that - ICO / <insert your data protection agency here> probably isn't). Companies can't just smash a button and claim meaningful interaction, it has to be, well, meaningful and smashing a "nope" button obviously isn't meaninful.
If it turns out that it was only AI that screened it you can request a human review. Do not hold your breath.
Again, you'd make no friends doing it, but sooner or later a test case will emerge to generate some case law around "AI said no" because employment, or lack of because AI says no, does have significant impact on a human.
My collection so far is less than three years old and they're all from nursery stock. It's going to be at least another three years before I can start training them. Niwaki (in the ground) is less harsh on wounding than bonsai (in pots) and tends to focus more on the pruning rather than the overall aesthetic of creating a weathered yet, aesthetic tree. I'm aiming for somewhere in between.
The cool thing about the Elms is that they came from the seeds of a wych elm in a local park about four years ago which finally succumbed to dutch elm disease and was removed last year. I found the seeds in a drawer after being forgotten about for a two years, then germinated the seeds in 2024 they sprouted. I started six, but four have died.