Gum Tree Menace Stalks Canberra Streets

Bump,

Lots of gums in outer Belconnen. I have been looking at a dead one out my back door for 28 months now. Called TAMS on numerous occasions and they put paint on it although I don’t know how that will save a kid walking along the path from school when she falls.

I’d even happily pay for a replacment should someone be bothered to remove it.

Nothing a hatchet and concentrated saline at 3am can’t handle. I’m talking concentrated to the point of milky.

Ahh, Maelinar, how times have changed. Now you’d be struggling to get the good lady away from the Lifestyle channel on Fox to sweep up the leaves after you’d finished lopping and gone to the pub.

Gum trees don’t really suit the urban landscape and in these days of red tape and bleeding heart greenies pruning is almost taboo unless they’re in the power lines.

I recall that we always had a huge problems with trees damaging houses in NZ whenever there were storms, and funnily enough most of the trees involved weren’t eucalypts.

Clear felling the whole of Canberra might be a good idea, but unfortunately that would destroy a feature of the city that most people who live here like.

On the subject of trees;

Back in the days of white picket fences and wives who wore starched pinnies, and knew their place, it was considered a husbandly duty to keep the large trees maintained. So down with the pipe on a saturday morning, and up he went with a ladder and a bandsaw, to trim the tree.

In this day and age, by virtue of several layers of legislation and red tape, people aren’t inclined, nor are they motivated, to keep trees pruned.

A number of houses I have attended could have avoided the entire issue if they had trimmed only a few branches to reduce the wind load on the tree.

There are several reasons why people aren’t motivated to prune trees, even if the tree appears to be in imminent danger of collapse, they still won’t touch it. On a number of occasions I’ve heard that because the tree is on the verge of the road, it’s a council responsibility and not the landholders.

While I’m sure that you’d be told off for chopping the tree down, I’m reasonably sure that if you regularly and sensibly pruned it, nobody would even look twice.

Dangerous or not, gum trees are part of the Australian landscape, and ideally suited to our climate. Advocating a scorched-earth policy for any new development is foolish and shortsighted.

On the other hand, I’m sure the SES members on this site are probably getting sick of repairing roof damage caused by gum trees every time a storm rolls through. Maybe sensible land use around a gum tree is the way to go.