Tree Paint

[Wulkowicz]

Originally posted by Nickrosis
What do you think, Bob? I see Shigo mentions one of your favorite topics....tree paint.

Ahah! An agent provokotuuer...

Here is a page from Kesslick's site on wound painting:

<http://www.chesco.com/~treeman/dress.html>

<hr>

"<i>Many arborists have known this for a long time. Results of research on wound dressings by many investigators during the last decade have further convinced these arborists, and they have stopped using wound dressings, or have discussed the treatment with their clients. Some arborists in this group - we will call them Group I - may paint wounds for cosmetic reasons, if the client still wants it done. Others in Group I refuse to paint wounds because they believe it reflects poorly on their professionalism.

Group II is arborists that doubt the worth of dressings for decay prevention, but want more proof. They are open-minded. Some have stopped using dressings; others are still using thinner coats of the materials.

Group III is made up of arborists who will not change their minds about wound dressings, or any other tree care practice, no matter what is said, done, or printed. Some members of this group manufacture wound dressings for profit.

Others have just grown up" with wound dressings and consider them a hallmark of professionalism. This is not bad, so long as the materials are not being sold or applied with the implication that they will prevent decay.

It is unrealistic to think that the use of wound dressings will ever cease; the search will continue for the perfect dressing. The increasing variety of new chemicals and the lure of easy profit encourage constant testing. The problem is that the emphasis is on the materials and not the tree, or profit first and tree second.

The purposes of this paper are to present some additional data from wound dressing experiments to help Group II, and to discuss new directions for helping trees, especially for GroupI. We respectfully recognize Group III, so long as they are professionals, but we will not try to convince them that wound dressings do not stop decay.</i> "

<hr>


Well, I'm in Group II, but it isn't that I doubt the worth of dressings and am simply waiting more proof of that doubt. Instead, I believe in the concept of useful dressings, but think that proof of any value has still to be found.

This won't happen in the present climate of cliches and dogma. Some experimental results 20 years ago for both wound closure speed and for decay prevention are presently almost muddled beyond redemption.

This inhibits further exploration and innovation with every parroting of the phrases that begin with "Experts say, ..." Personally, I'm sick of listening to it.

Every thing we do and say as professionals should be subject to routine re-examination, if for no other reason, to see if new truths have somehow slipped in the doorway. Professionalism is not that we all sound the same, and our strengths are evidenced in being indistinguishable from the next pro as interrogated by the public, or as yammered repeatedly in forums, or nodded to collegially with bent elbows after a conference.

Tar, paint or plastic; what do I care which specific one might benefit trees? But if we believe an answer probably won't ever be, then there's not ever to be any enthusiam for the search.

Speeding wound closure with a paint, I've alway thought was a dubious pursuit becase closure is essentially a mathematical function governed by the productivity of the leaves above. I simply wouldn't go looking in that direction at this moment.

And, very importantly, we are describing two distinctly different injury scenarios with the same word much like how we interchange suckers and watersprouts as only suckers.

An injury to the face of a woody cylinder is a decidedly different circumstance than a severing of a branch or any connection between cylinders. We call the both wounds and have a real blind spot about that. Should the same treatment or product work equally on both?

It may be quite improbable, but we still sell and use the same product for any "wounds." If the wounds are different; maybe the products should be different as well.

I gotta go right now, but this is an important issue--not if paint works, but how we look at things, and how dogma forces a narrow, perhaps too narrow, perspective.


Bob Wulkowicz

 

[rborist1]

:Eye:

 

[ORclimber]

I had never painted cuts until last month. I was doing multi-day job at a 55+ trailer park. The contract stated raising a giant sequoia 6 feet off the roofs of 2 buildings. The canopy of the tree was also over a picnic area, and all of the mail boxes for the 100 residents so they all got a good look at the tree every day. I had to raise the lower limbs up about 4 whorls to get the branch tips 6' off the roofs. The residents saw the shiners, started complaining about how much had come off the tree and the next day the owner told me she never would agreed to me working on that tree if she would have known how much I was going to take off the tree. The manager suggested I paint the shiners and that if the residents/owner couldn't see where the cuts had been made they would stop complaining. I bought some brown latex that matched the sequoia bark and applied it early the next morning. The complaining stopped, and I still have the account.

 

[Wulkowicz]

Originally posted by rborist1
Boob,

Its good to see that you are stirring up the melting pot of our minds. This thread reminds me of a conversation I had with one Tubs a couple of years ago. I am sitting this one out for the time being as the infamous lurker that I am.

I always had a hard time remembering if you were the infamous lurker or infamous lurcher.


Tubs

Or wait, maybe it was as a melted pot of a mind...

Oops, I better be careful, or JPS will accuse me of a personal attack and banish me to the eternal JPS Zoo--on the outside, looking in.

"There," he''ll explain to the cheering audience, "good riddance to bad tubbish."

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

No no, you did not call him an idiot or a moron or so imply. He is not a new poster either, so I assume it is the normal jocular banter.

 

[Wulkowicz]

Originally posted by John Paul Sanborn
... so I assume it is the normal jocular banter.

Jocular banter is generally mild compared to jockular banter. Is there a meter for that?

Bob :angel:

 

[FBerkel]

Bob,

I understand your point regarding different potential applications of some form of wound dressing, but do you question whether traditional tar-based dressings interfere with compartmentalization?

 

[rborist1]

:Eye:

 

[Wulkowicz]

Originally posted by rborist1
Boob,

I do believe that all of that east coast air is getting to you or is it something in the water. Anyways, its good to see you made it to the board, you original insight is welcome here. I do look forward to more of the "Jocular banter " that you alone can offer.

To paint or not to paint...................that is the question!

Hey, Jabbers,

Stop patting me on the back in public or I'll be forced to call you an idiot or a moron. That'll bring JPS down on me in a high velocity swoop faster than Cheney on speeedos.

Then, I'll be trying to be inciteful over on some other forum. I'm in Chitown with bad air, and water filled with additives to keep lead from leaching out of the supply pipes. I'm, by definition therefore, rather teste.


To think or not to think.........that is the more important question.



wulkowicz

 

[Wulkowicz]

Originally posted by FBerkel

Bob,

I understand your point regarding different potential applications of some form of wound dressing, but do you question whether traditional tar-based dressings interfere with compartmentalization?

Let me establish a personal view of context and background by opening with a story by Steve Silverman:

<i>It all started way back in 1859 in Brooklyn, New York. Imagine a young chemist named Robert Chesebrough (of Chesebrough-Ponds fame) at work in his office. Young Robby was burdened by a very common problem of the time - he sold kerosene for fuel, but the great oil strikes in Pennsylvania threatened his livelihood.

What to do? What to do?

He did the obvious thing - he hopped in his horse and buggy and made his way to Titusville, Pennsylvania, the home of the oil well. His intentions were well - strike it rich in oil.

However, he became intrigued with a paraffin-like gooey substance that stuck to the drilling rigs. The riggers hated this stuff - it caused the drilling rigs to seize up. For all the problems this substance caused, the riggers found one small use - when rubbed on a cut or bruise it helped it to heal faster.

Robby bottled the stuff up and dragged it back to his Brooklyn laboratory. It didn't take him long to extract the key pasty ingredient - the translucent material we now know as petroleum jelly.

He needed a guinea pig to test it out on. Slashing his wife and kids up for the sake of science was out of the question. He chose to inflict all types of cuts and burns on himself to test the stuff out. They all seemed to heal quickly without any sign of infection when the goop was applied.

His next problem: what to name it?

We can imagine the names he may have tossed around - "Yellow slippery stuff", "100 million year old stuff from oil wells", or "Slip 'n Slide brand lubricant".

They were all catchy names for our modern society, but people were dumber back then (your parents were dumber than you, and they thought the same of their parents, and so on...).

He chose a great name - vaseline.

Why vaseline? - No one really knows.

I like to believe the story that he would store the stuff in his wife's vases in the lab, and since all medical products back then ended in "ine" (Listerine, Murine, etc.) - he came up with vaseline.

Selling it was easy for Chesebrough - he simply loaded up his horse-and-buggy and gave out free samples across New York State. Within six months he had twelve buggy setups distributing the stuff.

People used this stuff for everything: cuts and bruises, removing stains from furniture, polishing wood surfaces, restoring leather, preventing rust, and as a sexual aid (you can use your imagination on this one). Druggists used vaseline as a base for their other medicines and ointments. </i>

<hr>

It strikes me there's an inherent genetic fondness in the human spirit for something drippy and mucousy that then allows anything with those physical characteristics to become beloved and stick around forever. Freud might explain it as a response to early toilet training and keeping one's own poo, but I take a distinkly less clinical view.

For whatever reason, today, it's green slime. Throughout my lifetime, vaseline has been a dolloped staple. For the arboreally inclined over a few hundred years, ugly, sticky tarry stuff has been smeared everywhere possible on a tree for its obvious magical effects.

Early medical doctors set their prestige and status by having the most malodorous and vile concoctions possible to swallow, inhale or smear. It's little wonder that tree doctors wouldn't take up the same tactics.

Having never seen a lamb tree, I'm intrigued by how lanolin gained its fame. But I guess, if enough people keep doin somethin, we end up with dogma. (Speaking of that, since there are dogwood trees, I'm surprised that tree wounds weren't slobbered with Fido innards.)

I suspect arborists were quicker to stop wound painting than to stop flush cutting because of their wives. The women had to clean that ???? tar that got everywhere, while they couldn't care less if their man took off a limb with a V-notch.

<hr>

<i>...do you question whether traditional tar-based dressings interfere with compartmentalization?</i>

Fred,

Somewhere in my wanderings above I suggest traditional tar dressings evolved well separated from any effect on a tree. They didn't melt the tree, and arborists didn't fall dead from touching the stuff, so the purported pluses weren't countered by any memorable minuses. Bingo, tar dressings stuck.

Compartmentalization, a word perhaps that is longer than it has any right to be, is only beginning to be understood. It is very complex, and Shigo and Shortle say in their 1983 abstract:

<i>The individual tree had a greater effect on the wound than the treatments. Some individual trees of a species closed and compartmentalized wounds rapidly and effectively, regardless of treatment, while other trees did not close and compartmentalize treated or control wounds. </i>

If we, then or now, can't quite discern the range of individual wounding responses between treatment trees and control trees, we can honestly say that treatments seem to not make any difference. I can accept that. But, in equal honesty, I can take the lower, primal road and simply say we can't tell.

If we say it doesn't make any difference, why do we say, don't do it, so emphatically? Tree paint has become a pejorative; "painting" is now a bad action.

Well, I don't know that it is; I'm quite content with, "what we tried so far hasn't made a difference." That position allows the past experience, and still leaves the door open for future discoveries.

I do applaud attacking the snake oil and the magic bullets, and I think those were the original intents, but the issues have become distorted and then fossilized.

As I waddle toward your question, I want to separate wound closure from compartmentalization. Indeed, both can have the same point of initial injury, but they are individual responses and trackings that can benefit from our consideration of each by themselves for a few moments.

Well, don't we do that already? Yes, we often do, but in the world of wound treatment as reported in the abstract and in the field, it is blurred.

What magic occurs when a wound closes? Is the tree home-free? Is compartmentalization aided by the complete coverage? Is compartmentalization no longer necessary? Is a quarter-inch opening relevant? Is it better a proof of the adage, "Out of sight; out of mind?"

Is plastic wrap an instant replacement for wound closure? If it is, why aren't two coats of latex paint?

<hr>

How can compartmentalization be interfered with, and to what extent? I don’t even know that, let alone how specific tar products may somehow affect it. So yes, I question the intereference. Not preventing decay is not the same as causing decay. One is a failed goal; the other, probably an interference.

As I pointed out before, a wound to the surface of a trunk is significantly different than a cross-section cut of a limb. Compartmentalization in each circumstance has different destinies.

So, which one are we referring to; what follows a drill hole, or follows the removal of a limb?

<hr>

Trees run on tree time. That can be tediously slow for us; we can watch a tree reach a first consideration, and by the time it gets to the second, we've gone off and found another career, so there's no one there to see it.

With my understanding of tree time, I made an opening discussion and proposal over in the ISA forums for what I call CODIT Pruning. It recognizes the importance and usefulness of <u >time</u> for a new practical technique

In a real sense, I can describe it as a substitute for tree paint; it can meet the same goals and it doesn’t get your pants messy. Isn’t that a kick in the dogma?


Bob Wulkowicz

 

[FBerkel]

Bob,

Say in limb removal, with proper "shigo cuts". Isn't oxygen required to form compounds that slow decay, and doesn't tree paint interfere with the passage of oxygen through the pruning cut?

 

[Wulkowicz]

Originally posted by FBerkel
Bob,

Say in limb removal, with proper "shigo cuts". Isn't oxygen required to form compounds that slow decay, and doesn't tree paint interfere with the passage of oxygen through the pruning cut?

Shigo taught us to avoid cutting the branch bark collar because that bump contained the intersection where the branch vascular system merged with the trunk vascular syatem.

With a flush cut, we not only removed the branch and its systems permanently, we also cut the top and the bottom of the trunk system that was being diverted around the existing branch.

There was no reason to do that, Shigo argued. We slowed wound closure that way and crippled what was a natural sequence of compartmentalization which made a tree more vulnerable to decay.

<hr>

I don't have an easy answer for your question about oxygen being needed to form decay-inhibiting compounds, except to say that oxygen must be available at all times to the living cells inside a tree to allow maintenance metabolism and for the activities of dividing cells. It might be that these uses sequester most of any available oxygen, and there's not enough left to trigger premature comparmentalization, so the tree interior stays in an defensive readiness. Perhaps, that's how trees handle small local injuries.

However, significant CODIT responses can occur at the same time in parts of the tree so distant from from any breech in the bark covering that it might be presumed that higher oxygen levels can't easily migrate to those locations, so there are likely some other mechanisms at work.

Here, you are talking about the removal of a branch and then covering the stub end with "paint" that blocks oxygen access. Let's say for the moment that you're correct and it's not in the tree's best interest to have oxygen denied at the wound. That "preferred" state then also allows any spore or pathogen around, easy access to the interior of the tree through the exposed ends of the old branch vascular system.

The tree must rush to block those subway entrances with tyloses or plugs and chemical barriers because it knows full well there are pathogens coming for lunch. The chemical changes you described are designed to delay or inhibit decay. They may be precipitated or enhanced by the presence of oxygen, but I must say that I can't agree that this is a reason for leaving wounds uncovered or open.

It's wrong to argue that leaving pruning wounds alone is recommended because we leave the tree to natural processes. I'll bet compartmentalization evolution goes back a few dozen million years, while saw and chainsaw-type cutting can't go back more than a few thousand.

Trees never anticipated the types of wound we routinely leave. They expected breaks, tears and limb death; that's a big jump from those to our repeated instantaneous injuries right at a branch junction. (And I am counting the flush cuts that Shigo and Shortle said went on for 400 or more years previously.)

Tree time. It is the time scale at which each tree operates acording to its genetic background. We come and short-circuit it with a saw, then say it's natural, and walk away. Strikes me as a bit foolish, cosidered we say we know so much about trees.

I'm not critical of you or your question. Oxygenation may be an important process in a defense against decay. I'm not knowledgeable about those possibilities or details, and I will research them, but my instincts tell me what damage we do in our prunings far overweigh the oxygen denied by any painting. It's a bit like a tank driving in through a storefront and then pointing to a squished smear on the floor. Yes, it's there and it is a result of the invasion, but in proportion to everything else...

We had a habit of finding reasons after the fact to explain our practices until Alex set us on our collective ear with the furor about flush cutting. It's healthy to debate and reconsider perspectives--at least that's what I think. Thanks for writing and asking good questions.

Bob Wulkowicz

 

[FBerkel]

Bob,

Presumably, one of our goals in pruning is to minimize total decay volume in "tree time". We try to minimize the number of cuts, choose smaller ones over larger, prune at proper times. Also, we use strategies such as training leaders, encouraging trunk taper, etc., that (we think) make a tree stronger for the long term. This would be a beneficial tradeoff: small wounds now to prevent large ones later. Maybe we are fooling ourselves in this effort, but maybe not. Isn't it possible that an experienced, observant arborist could achieve these goals?

If so, then I think the marginal gain of preventing further decay in our unnatural cuts would be a worthwhile goal.

I appreciate the level of knowledge and thought you bring to this discussion.

 

[Wulkowicz]

Originally posted by FBerkel
Bob,

Presumably, one of our goals in pruning is to minimize total decay volume in "tree time". We try to minimize the number of cuts, choose smaller ones over larger, prune at proper times. Also, we use strategies such as training leaders, encouraging trunk taper, etc., that (we think) make a tree stronger for the long term. This would be a beneficial tradeoff: small wounds now to prevent large ones later. Maybe we are fooling ourselves in this effort, but maybe not. Isn't it possible that an experienced, observant arborist could achieve these goals?

If so, then I think the marginal gain of preventing further decay in our unnatural cuts would be a worthwhile goal.

I appreciate the level of knowledge and thought you bring to this discussion.

CODIT Pruning will provide a dramatic gain in dealing with decay when removing large limbs.

The problem most people will have with the concept is it clearly runs on tree time. There's nothing I can do about that. But it will absolutely work. Greed and impatience will be its worst adversaries.


Bob Wulkowicz

 

[Kneejerk Bombas]

.

.

 

[TheTreeSpyder]

Great education in fluid words, thanx for staying Wulke!

Mike, i missed your point there bud!

edit-look this made it to the top line of threadlist; that 'sticky' must have fallen off the ceiling!

 

[Guy Meilleur]

Originally posted by FBerkel
Bob,

Presumably, one of our goals in pruning is to minimize total decay volume in "tree time". We try to minimize the number of cuts, choose smaller ones over larger, prune at proper times. Also, we use strategies such as training leaders, encouraging trunk taper, etc., that (we think) make a tree stronger for the long term. This would be a beneficial tradeoff: small wounds now to prevent large ones later. Maybe we are fooling ourselves in this effort, but maybe not. Isn't it possible that an experienced, observant arborist could achieve these goals?

If so, then I think the marginal gain of preventing further decay in our unnatural cuts would be a worthwhile goal.

Right on. See Fungal Strategies of Wood Decay in Trees, by Schwarze, Engels and Mattheck: Large wounds are slow to heal and become motorways for decay in the heart of the tree. In light of this phenomenon we've all witnessed, experimentation with sealants on wounds taht are prone to cracking is not only warranted but obligatory for those who do not want to create hollow trees.
Shellac works.

DK Fighter

 

[Kneejerk Bombas]

Originally posted by Guy Meilleur
Shellac works.

DK Fighter

What do you mean it works?

 

[treeclimber165]

It means that he made some cuts, painted shellac on them and they did not rot out. So it MUST work!

 

[Oxman]

Tree paint than seals an injury seals in decay causing micro orgasms. If your goal is to rapidly discolor the offending injury try rubbing mud or dirt into the injury. Soil has anti biotic properties and chewing or boring insects dislike the tiny particles. Diatamatious earth has been used to treat wood for carpenter ants and termites for years.

John Kakouris
WC isa Certified arborist #379