The December/January 2021-22 edition of The Australian Arbor Age is packed full with great feature stories. We start off with Part 3 of Stephen Frank and Kirsten Raynor’s “Tree Selection Process”, followed by Guy Meilleur’s “Historic Tree Care in Europe” – Part 2.
We are gaining ground on the subject of resilience as we shift from 2021 into 2022. On topic with resilience, more so with our community, we tackle the subject of mental health and wellbeing. Peter Dubiez has created a great initiative with pertinent questions – “R U OK – A Conversation Could Change a Life”. In this piece Adam Jarvis of Woodvale Tree Services responds with a message from the heart.
TCAA comes on board from this issue with a solid input on “Tree Risk and Lightning – An Arborists Guide”.
In the ‘Association News’ section QAA follows up to the recent AGM sharing the latest from the new 2021/22 Committee – plus the QAA turns 30 – as a founder past committee member myself I attest to the grey hair.
In ‘Case Study’ we talk to Trees R Us about their business growth while in the equipment section we feature chippers and clean-up options followed by a selection of innovative products.
Always looking to the alliance between people, in service to people and trees, this edition serves as notification of an alliance I am keen to promote on behalf of our profession, The Australian Arbor Age magazine and arboriculture.
My latest article on topic is the start of a new series from me on ancient trees (the true champions of resilience) with my first article in this series – ‘The Body Language of an Ancient Sentinel’. In developing this article, I gained support from two advanced climbing arborists (that story is covered in this feature). The experience of our teamwork prompted me to set the scene for future climbing assessments of our ancient trees. This led me to seek out the opportunity to unite with national and international arborists as a means to promote the ancients, us and arboriculture.
To these ends, I am seeking to partner with the national and international High Climbers Brotherhood (hopefully in time also in association with our national associations). My gift to this alliance is a template for data collection on Australian ancient trees to be used to enable us to serve them, as well as support each other in education and networking.
Hopefully this kind of networking will also enable us to raise funding for conservation arboricultural projects, paying for our input.
Last but not least, I’d like to wish you all a wonderful Christmas and New Year. Thanks for another great 12 months in the Australian arb industry, and we’ll look forward to catching up and powering on in 2022.
Cheers, Cassian Humphreys, AA Sub Editor