Well, I am not a certified or licensed arborist (no such thing when I had a landscaping business in CA at the time), but I did get certified and licensed in horticulture and landscape design back then, and I have a recent certificate in
silviculture. Different scale than arborist, taking care of stands, but it is all about trees just the same. I take care of large stands of trees now (85 acres here, and on some larger parcels of land that I own elsewhere). I do not climb that much any more, and I did not specialize in trees in the horticulture business with my brother. However, we pruned and felled a hell of a lot of trees. Monterey Pines and coastal live oaks, especially, and I did a large amount of fruit tree pruning there (for both ornamental and fruiting).
My point being that being licensed or certified is not the holy grail on the path to arborist glory. We span the globe here, and having a certificate or license here does not mean the same thing down under, or in Europe, or anywhere else. Certification varies quite a lot by country, state and region. I have seen licensed arborists in San Diego absolutely DESTROY every fruit spur on a stone and pome fruit orchard. They pruned them like lemons... wrong way to do that. I also know some people that have never been certified, or licensed, but they can prune an orchard to perfection, or prune a whole town of street trees and do it right. In other words, certificatin does not always mean great quality in terms of pruning trees, and not being certified does not always mean you are an idiot that does not know a leaf from a root. And there are circumstances that are outside of the typical suburban and urban settign, as well as outside the typical forest plantation setting where terms, knowledge, and things like arborist licenses get blurred.
For example, here we have 20-30 species of native trees, and we are doing a lot of thinning, harvesting and slective cutting for a variety of situations on these properties. Currently we are thinning a restoring a 4 acre oak grove that is over 400 years old. The grove itself is a remnant of the Indian tribes that lived here (the Yoncalla tribe of the greater Calapooya Native American Indians). They burned the fields around here in late summer months to keep open areas for hunting game. Since the last select cut up there 20 years ago, the grand and doug firs have invaded and are beginning to crown crowd the trees for light. They are also taking away the fire resistance of the oaks; if a fire were to come through the firs would go up like torches and burn the oak canopy. So we are removing all the firs and removing the dead oaks and doing some oak thinning.
Yah, it is not pruning in the sence of an arborist, but... it is still pruning and selective thinning, on a large scale. And for unusual reasons and purposes. But this is one of the few remaining stands of this type around here. These are California Black Oaks, at the northern most region that they grow. We have had to come up with our own requirements, debate with the forestry guy that is doing the Rx for us (for property tax reasons in this state) and go against the 'plant it all in Doug fir' mentality that pervades this area by all the local timber professionals. I mean, we could have felled all the oaks and cut them into firewood, and moved the area into high value commercial fir production, just like everything else around here. And I mean everything: there are stands for hundreds of square miles around here that are nothing but Douglas fir trees in various stages of the clear-cutting cycle. Trees here are just long term crops. And in that relm, tree topping here is a part of the felling technique during cutting.
Anyway, what were we talking about???
