The Best Overview of Tree Science
The study of how trees develop, react to their surroundings, and can be cared for is known as arboriculture.
This course discusses the methods and procedures needed to cultivate trees and keep them healthy. This includes selecting trees that are suitable for the environment, planting and staking them, watering and fertilising them, choosing the right pruning techniques, cabling and bracing broken tree limbs, diagnosing issues like nutritional disorders, managing pests and diseases, transplanting, and tree removal.
Hone your abilities to recognise and treat tree diseases
This course develops your skills and understanding in diagnosis and treatment of tree disorders.
- Discover how to properly handle pests, diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and water issues.
- By correctly identifying a tree disease, you can save money.
- Enhance your safety by using proper tree-trimming techniques.
- With the right pruning and training techniques, production can be increased.
This course is essential for anyone working with trees.
Suitable for:
- horticulturalists
- gardeners
- farmers who treat trees
- any person who works with trees
You will be able to detect and cure current tree problems, including soil problems, thanks to this in-depth and thorough training.
Trees are far too frequently the unsung heroes of our outdoor spaces. A shrub or ground cover plant is far more readily visible to the human eye than a tree, and because of this, these plants typically attract the majority of our attention. Out of sight, out of memory appears to apply to trees very frequently.
In actuality, trees pose much larger risks than shrubs. A shrub that blows over leaves a hole in the garden bed and makes a little bit of a mess. A tree that blows over could crush your new automobile, obliterate part of your garden, or create a sizable hole in the top of a house. Like people, trees are susceptible to injury, illness, and eventually death. If they are to live as long as possible, they need to be fed, given water, and given “doctoring.” Like some people, certain trees are more resilient and never seem to get sick. But, many trees also experience “medical” issues that go unnoticed until it’s too late.
Lesson Structure
There are 8 lessons in this course:
- Introduction to Arboriculture
- Trees in the garden, Planting in the right position, Choosing the right variety, Choosing the right specimen, How to plant different types of trees, Transplanting, Tree Guards, Using a Tree Report Form
- Tree Biology
- Tree growth, Photosynthesis, Respiration, Transpiration, Vernalisation, What makes foliage change colour, Tree physiology, Roots, Stems, Leaves, Bud types, How a tree grows, Vascular tissue, Cambium, Xylem, Phloem, Secondary growth, Growth rings, Heartwood, Sapwood, Compartmentalisation, Water and plant growth, Growth rate factors, Arboricultural terminology
- Soils In Relation to Trees
- Fertilising, Compacted soils, Tree health and drainage, Treating soil over winter, Changed soil levels around trees, Measuring pH, Measuring soil organic content, Measuring water content, Determining fertiliser solubility, Testing affect of lime on soil, Laboratory testing of soils, Soil texture, Measuring salinity, Soil horizons, Soil Naming, Soil nutrition, Fertilisers, etc
- Diagnosing Tree Problems
- Tree health disorders, Frost protection, Minimising frost and wind damage, Mulch and frost, Mistletoe, Diagnosing problems, Conducting a Tree inspection
- Tree Surgery
- Tree surgery-do you need it, Review of techniques, Tree surgery safety, Safety and the worker, Public safety, Safety regulations, Cavity treatments, Bracing, Cabling, Propping, Bark wounds, Tree climbing techniques, Knots, Anchoring points, etc.
- Pruning of Trees
- Pruning objectives, Removing branches, Crown cleaning, Crown thinning, Crown reduction, Crown lifting, Crown renewal, Fruit tree pruning, Felling a whole tree, Felling sections of a tree, terminology.
- Arboriculture Equipment
- Secateurs, Hand saws, Power tools, Safety with electricity, Engine and tool maintenance, Chain saws, Hedge trimmers, Ladders, Harnesses, Ropes, Pole belt, Spurs, etc
- Workplace Health and Safety
- Duty of Care, Lifting & manual handling, Protective equipment, Handling tools and machinery, Auditing tools and equipment
Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school’s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.
Aims
- Explain the steps taken to provide healthy trees under various circumstances, including the selection of the right plants.
- With relation to arboriculture, describe the biology of trees, including their morphology, anatomy, and physiology.
- Create policies for managing soils for better tree growth.
- Provide methods for controlling environmental, pest, and disease issues as well as tree health diseases.
- Find out what surgical procedures are often performed in arboriculture to repair plant damage.
- Describe the methods of tree surgery that are frequently employed in arboriculture to prune growth.
- Choose the right tools for the job when doing arboriculture.
- For an arboricultural workplace, determine the best workplace health and safety practises.
What You Will Do
- Differentiate between plants to recognise a variety of trees.
- Create a standard tree report form that is customised to survey the usage and condition of trees in your community.
- Describe three specific soil issues that can affect trees and how to solve them.
- Create a 12-month plan to address a health issue you identified in an established tree.
- Show how to bridge graft over a bark wound.
- Several pruning techniques should be distinguished, including:
- lowering of the canopy, cleaning, topiary, and espaliering
- Establish the bare minimum equipment needed to start a tree surgery business.
- To discover the best uses for each chainsaw, compare the various models.
- In a workplace you visit, ascertain the laws that apply to a certain arborist.
WHAT IS TREE ROOTING?
Working in arboriculture requires a fundamental understanding of tree decay.
The compartmentalization process describes how a tree naturally defends itself from disease attack. A scientist from the United States named Dr. Alex Shigo initially described it in the 1970s and 1980s. He called it the CODIT system, which compartmentalises tree degradation. The process is outlined in the section below.
A healthy tree has a built-in tendency to slow the growth of wood rots, as will be seen below:
There are numerous “compartments” that make up tree trunks and branches. The compartment walls are barriers that naturally develop within woody stems rather than anatomical features.
- In comparison to spreading within a compartment, disease/wood rots find it more challenging to penetrate one compartment into the next.
- Chemicals are deposited around a tree’s wound when microorganisms first assault it, acting as a barrier to the spread of illness.
- Certain bacteria have the ability to grow through this defence, allowing them to advance behind the initial intruders. A snowball effect can happen, with successive waves of microorganisms doing more harm and making it challenging to stop the development of infection.
- The “wall” of fresh wood and bark tissue that is created each year is another “compartment” that functions to stop the spread of rot. (Or, each ring in the cut segment of wood is a defence against infection.)
- Hence, wood rots more quickly up and down a tree trunk than it does further towards the tree’s centre.
Arborists’ Understanding of Compartmentalization
The capacity of individual trees to contain deterioration varies. Certain species, such Populus (poplar), Salix (willow), Brachychiton, Erythrina (coral tree), and Liriodendron (tulip tree), do not readily form compartments.
Further injury, pathogen virulence, and tree vigour are other crucial variables. This natural process may be hampered by tree surgical procedures including trimming, bracing, and cavity treatment, which severely injure trees. This can lead to the decay spreading to fresh wood. Because to this, cavity drilling and cavity rod bracing are no longer considered to be normal arboriculture practises (see next section on Tree Surgery Techniques).
WHAT CAUSES THE AUTUMN COLOR CHANGE IN FOLIAGE?
Everyone enjoys the fall foliage, but how you manage your trees depends on your ability to comprehend it and what it symbolises.
Deciduous plants lose their leaves in the fall or early winter, and during the colder months of the year, they are completely or partially leafless. With this adaptability, the plant is better able to withstand adverse circumstances (such as extreme cold).
They go through a senescence phase before the leaves fall.
Senescence is the time when leaf cells gradually die.
During this senescence period, tissue at the base of the leaf gradually dies until a piece of tissue between the leaf and the stem is completely dead (At this point there is nothing left to hold the leaf to the stem; so it detaches and drops to the ground.)
The amount of chlorophyll in the leaf, which gives it its typical green colour, decreases as senescence takes place. Chlorophyll is actually just one of several pigments that are typically present in leaves, but because it is frequently the strongest pigment, if a plant is healthy, the majority of its leaves will typically seem green.
Additional kinds of pigment compounds that are frequently discovered in leaves include:
- Reds, blues, and purple anthocyanins
- Oranges and Yellows are carotenoids.
In the fall, carotenoids often also break down quickly, but anthocyanins do so considerably more slowly.
Even when only 40% of the typical amounts of chlorophyll and carotenoids are present, anthocyanin levels can frequently still be close to 100% normal. Chemical reactions take place in the presence of intense light to make anthocyanins from excess sugars in leaves. Given this, the concentration of anthocyanins will be higher if the plant had been actively making sugars through photosynthesis over the summer and had a lot of sunny autumn days (if weather is frequently overcast and dull in late summer and autumn; the production of anthocyanins is decreased).
As a result, if the weather quickly shifts from warm to cool, the leaf sugar stays high and anthocyanin levels increase. If the weather were to change slowly, these pigment levels might not be as high. The colours of the autumn foliage will often be more brilliant when anthocyanin levels are high.
Variations
Within a species, plants can nevertheless differ in their autumnal hue from one another. Variations consist of:
- the moment when colour appears (some produce colour earlier, others later)
- the length of colour (some maintain good colour for longer periods)
- the hue’s intensity
Such changes may be impacted by:
- length of seasons
- seasons’ severness
- Whether it faces north, south, east, or west degree of protection, and whether climate changes are gradual or more abrupt (whether it is exposed or protected by walls or other plants)
- genetics
- Parentage of cutting/grafting material, for instance, can have a big impact on particular plants based on their sex.
SET UP THE BEST PATH FOR YOUR CAREER
It takes time to learn effectively and ingrain knowledge into your mind; it also takes a properly structured learning experience backed by experienced and knowledgeable educators. You don’t become a good arborist by taking quickie short courses.
Even the best course can only go you so far if you don’t lay a solid foundation via your studies. If you do, learning will continue through experience after you complete the course, and it will probably be quicker, simpler, and more relevant.
This is the course that we want to lead you down.
What should you research?
Let us assist you in choosing what is best for you!
- Get in touch with us and let us know about your interests and goals.
- Let us know your circumstances so we can appropriately advise you.
- Thus, you can decide what to learn more intelligently.
How This Training May Be of Use to You
Many people, including:
- Arborists
- Gardeners
- tree specialists
- City employees or contractors
- Environmentalists
- creating environmental reports as consultants
- those who evaluate construction sites or specific trees
- individuals engaged in re-vegetation
- Individuals engaged in the restoration of sites, such as farms, mining operations, reforestation projects, etc.
- Any person who evaluates trees for public safety
