Cutting out the problems
With a love of the outdoors and a passion for trees, Donald Picker, managing director of Asia Tree Preservation, is ideally suited to caring for the environment
I always had a love of the outdoors and it became evident early on that I wasn't going to be sitting behind a desk for great lengths of time. I grew a garden as a young boy and was also interested in trees.
I had always been involved in one way or another with green industries and throughout my school years I was doing work at my wife's family's tree nursery, planting, drawing plans and landscaping. A natural knack for climbing made tree work ideal for me. After graduating in linguistics and social research, I went to work for a tree company. Even before college, my climbing skills landed me a position at a power utility company, building power lines. I was climbing towers and constructing things in the air, which was a practical job that made me a lot of money because of dangerous practices, but the same union that was building power lines was also helping to clear them of tree branches, so I moved on to pruning trees.
Generally, if you work as a tree worker, you either work on the ground or on the tree. You have to climb the tree and prune it. From there I rediscovered tree climbing. My experiences as a utility worker gave me an education on careful practices for climbing trees, and I learned more from an entrepreneurial approach when in 1984 I started my own tree-care company known as Picker Tree Experts in the Chicago region. I then became a certified arborist and have remained a practising one.
On any given day, I might be talking to the manager of a grounds or property or a developer who is trying to preserve the trees on a site as they figure out how to build around trees. I might meet with an architect or grounds manager who is trying to understand how we preserve trees. The next day, I might get into that same tree that we were discussing and actually do the pruning. I may have to go to places like Hong Kong Golf Club to discuss with the grounds people how to bring in more light and brighten up a tee area.
I tell my workers to continue what I started, giving them the basic information. I provide training for apprentice tree workers and conduct assessments on trees considered potentially dangerous.
We need to look for plant problems and diseases. The outer condition of a tree can determine how bad the roots are. Initially, it might be a basic assessment but this can become a hazard assessment if we determine the tree has the potential to fail. We look for three factors: conditions that include the potential for a tree or part to fail, the size of the part that might fail and the presence of targets such as people or property.
In many cases, it might be the roots that are deteriorating. So we can get down on the ground and probe and see if there is any evidence of conks or mushrooms. Then we'll look at the outer core of the tree for fractures and cracks. We'll look for decay in holes, the amount of decay in the circumference and the amount of dead material in the crown.
Although we must maintain an effort to preserve trees, ultimately it's all about avoiding a dangerous situation that affects people.
