Losing a peach of a beech

A FRIEND and neighbour of mine owns a farm on which there are several hundred beautiful mature trees. He loves them but recently they have cost him rather a lot of money.

The farm has quite a long road frontage and, unfortunately, when he employed a tree surgeon to survey the trees, he discovered that some of them were over-mature and in danger of falling on to passing traffic.

If such a thing does happen the landowner is legally liable. His insurance company became quite agitated. So, being a person who does things by the book, he embarked on the process of applying for a licence to fell them. This turned out to be an incredibly cumbersome and long-drawn out process involving several official bodies and government departments, each of which seemed very anxious to pass the file on to another one. But eventually, many months later, he was in a position to get back to the tree surgeons and ask them to remove the suspect trees.

Removing a very large, unsound tree beside a public road is a highly skilled business involving a lot of people and a lot of equipment.

There were three suspect trees, all very large beeches, growing right on the edge of the road. The farm house is Georgian, about 225 years old. I imagine the beeches were planted around the time that the house was built.

Beeches are not particularly long-lived trees, their life expectancy is usually reckoned to be between 200 and 250 years. So these trees were actually starting to die of old age.

The late 1700s and early 1800s saw a big upsurge in tree planting in this country and many of the beeches planted then are becoming senile. They will be followed by oaks planted at the same time, though longer lived species such as limes or planes can still expect centuries of healthy life.

The diagnosis from the tree surgeon was not death from old age. It was ganoderma infestation. Ganoderma are a genus of fungi of which three or four species grow in this country. The fruiting bodies are bracket fungi, also called shelf mushrooms, which grow out from the trunk, root buttresses or branches of the tree in horizontal plates. They are not regarded as edible but are important in oriental medicine and are being investigated by western medicine.

But ganoderma fungi don’t really kill trees. In fact they can be present for centuries in perfectly healthy beech trees. When the tree is sick they feed on the rotting wood, recycling its nutrients. They are, therefore, a symptom of disease rather than a cause of it.