The problem with "tree professionals"

This article about legal consequences for topping tress in San Francisco contains a gem. Apparently some people see it as a problem that property owners face liability for bad pruning, and not the pruners.

Mike Sullivan, Friends of the Urban Forest adviser and author of "Trees of San Francisco" (Pomegranate Communications), has another idea. "It's not really effective to punish the homeowners for topping trees. ... The people who should be subject to the ordinance are the tree professionals. They absolutely know the city's laws. If you fined them a couple hundred (dollars) it would ensure it wouldn't happen again."

Who do you suppose are the tree professionals Mr. Sullivan is talking about? I have some ideas!

If the property owner cheaps out and hires, um, tree professionals instead of a licensed or certified or certificated arborist (I'm not sure if arborists are licensed or certified or certificated--and I'm too lazy to look it up), then that wasn't that the property owner's decision?

And if you hire an arborist, and the arborist fucks up, it's not going to be hard to bring the arborist to court. Which might not be the case with tree professionals.

Yes.

"If [Thomas] Jefferson had dined only with those who'd been a force for good in the world, Jefferson would often have dined alone. If we insist only good and moral leaders talk to us, we'll wind up surrounded by silence. In fact, if we insist we talk only to those whose good deeds have matched their high aspirations, we won't always be on speaking terms with ourselves."

I'm not generally Peggy Noonan's biggest fan, but when she's right, she's right. RTWT.

Link.

Fine Gardening

The new issue (No. 118, Dec-07) has an interview with Napa County designer Brandon Tyson who, if the pictures of his work are any indication, is very good at what he does. The piece is titled Designing with Form & Texture. Sounds good! I'm all about form and texture.

Should I be disappointed when the interview sends mixed messages?

Consider the discussion of cuphea.

"Cupheas have a weak form but possess an extremely light, fine texture. They can set a receptive mood in which to stage more-assertive plants."

Okay, pair cuphea with assertive plants. I'm on board with that. But then there's this:

"Many of the sculptural plants that I love to use--beaked yucca, for example--have powerful forms, smooth textures, and subtle colors. [Sounds like an assertive plant!--ed.] If you combine them with another plant with the same qualities, the combination comes alive. Surround beaked yucca with cuphea--a lively plant that I see more as texture and color and less as form--and the yucca will steal the show."

But I thought we should use cuphea to set a receptive mood to stage assertive plants...?

Well, whatever. Design is an art, and you can't teach it like a science. Me, I am a scientist, and design can be a real challenge. I expect that, and I don't really mind. I enjoy tweaking my garden, and it's possible I enjoy the process more than the result. Well, that's me.

I have a cuphea on my roof deck. Cuphea turns out to be an excellent container plant for a hot, sunny roof in San Francisco. This one's looking a little piqued right now, but aren't we all? I had it with a fine-textured, hyper-flowery white angelonia and dusty lavendar agastage--it was horrible. Today, I took those out and added passalong orange-flowering aloe and passalong orange-flowering Cotyledon orbiculatum v. longifolium.



I happen to really like orange.

A bigger war, just around the corner?

I can't help feeling that it is.

Dictators consistently underestimate the strength of democracies, and democracies provoke war through their love of peace, which the dictators mistake for weakness.

Today, this same dynamic is creating a moment of great danger. The radicals are becoming reckless, asserting themselves for little reason beyond the conviction that they can. They are very likely to overreach. It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which a single match--say a terrible terror attack from Gaza--could ignite a chain reaction. Israel could handle Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, albeit with painful losses all around, but if Iran intervened rather than see its regional assets eliminated, could the U.S. stay out?

With the Bush administration's policies having failed to pacify Iraq, it is natural that the public has lost patience and that the opposition party is hurling brickbats. But the demands of congressional Democrats that we throw in the towel in Iraq, their attempts to constrain the president's freedom to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program, the proposal of the Baker-Hamilton commission that we appeal to Iran to help extricate us from Iraq--all of these may be read by the radicals as signs of our imminent collapse. In the name of peace, they are hastening the advent of the next war.

Link.

When chemistry is outlawed...

only outlaws will do chemistry.

"The same state where I do not have to register a handgun, forces me to register a glass beaker."

Link. Via.

Outrageous. Via.