Terrorists
I buy a lot of landscaping. And my latest purchases featured these:
Note the tag that says “killer tree”. I asked the sales guy what that meant. Seems these plants come from Oregon and they have a hippie problem where in the tree-huggers go in and plant spikes in trees hoping to hurt someone who is harvesting a tree. So, they have to go through with metal detectors before harvesting any tree and the put this label on it to show that it has been checked.
But we gun owners are the violent ones.
April 28th, 2013 at 5:38 pm
Ahh – “monkey-wrenching” – in one of it’s original forms. Hard to imagine a tree that small being a victim of it, tho.
April 28th, 2013 at 5:56 pm
Try explaining to a green weenies that timber companies treat trees like any other kind of plant: they plant them, grow them, and harvest them at the right time.
It’s like sneaking into a wheat field and placing land mines to blow up combines.
April 28th, 2013 at 6:35 pm
An exotic though hardly most common explanation, though. The “Killer tree” flagging is used in great numbers in the wildland fire community to identirfy hazard trees – those too dangerous for the average sawyers to drop and requiring the services of either a more advanced faller, mechanized equipment, fireline explosives, or some other means.
http://www.supplycache.com/prodinfo.asp?number=900-27951me other means.
If you check out the rest of the catalog, you’ll see more to do with the profession. I’m guessing maybe an off-season firefighter works at a nursery and had a fun time with some extra flagging.
April 28th, 2013 at 6:41 pm
Given that it is the saw mill that uses the metal detectors on already harvested trees, I’d guess that your nursery guy was giving you his version of the gun store, “So ,there I was…” or perhaps, “Well, everyone knows that the FBI would use this particular load, but the GAO has a bunch of liberal weinies that wouldn’t allow them to use something so deadly.” Every profession has its story tellers. Yes, Earth Firsters and ELFs do spike trees and not just in Oregon, but that’s not why “killer tree” tape exists.
If you are a regular visitor to that nursery, you might want to get a second opinion next time.
April 28th, 2013 at 8:56 pm
I’d keep a close eye on your landscaper. He’s probably planting those demonic killer trees that, while harmless in their nymph stage, will mature and eventually wind up eating the neighbors dog.
April 29th, 2013 at 10:11 am
another note – earth firsters and ELF types (I think they are all in jail now) went pretty wide in their vandalism, but tree spiking is most common with old growth stands under threat of being logged for the first time in history.
April 29th, 2013 at 10:23 am
Remember the evil tree from Poltergeist?
Yeah, that.
April 29th, 2013 at 1:30 pm
As Ancient Woodsman said.
Not even the greenest ELF terrorist would spike nursery trees, because that makes no sense from their worldview.
They spike trees that are going to be logged, to raise the cost of logging or injure a logger or mill employee.
(Plus, what would the point be of running a metal detector over a nursery tree even if they did that?
You’re not growing it for eventual logging, so it wouldn’t really matter if it had a spike in it… not that a sapling like that could hold one without being killed.)
April 29th, 2013 at 4:42 pm
Ancient Woodsman nailed it (heh). The “killer tree” tape is used during the mop-up phase of fighting a forest fire.
April 29th, 2013 at 5:02 pm
Semi-pro logger neighbor uses a metal detector when cutting up or slabbing fallen (or felled) urban trees with a chain saw. “Safety first”, he says, and related the tale of the first time he hit a big nail. Probably wasn’t sabotage, just a nail used for a bird feeder long ago. That didn’t make any difference to the chain saw ….