Entry #652426, added on 05-31-09 @ 3:16 pm EDT
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| What's Happening Below the Belt? | Entry #652426 |
Title: What’s Happening Below the Belt?
Date: May 31, 2009, Sunday
Thought: I’ve got to tell you, there’s a lot of pretty cool stuff happening below the belt. And, I would certainly want my doctor to know how to take care of all that area.
Jog: OK, what if your doctor informed you that he was only going to treat you from the waist up? Everything below the belt would be ignored. Or what if you decided you only care about your partner from the waist up? Nothing below the belt would get any attention. I’ve got to tell you, there’s a lot of pretty cool stuff happening below the belt. And, I would certainly want my doctor to know how to take care of all that area.
This concept was driven home to me yesterday. As you may or may not know, I am a city planner. As such, my professional affiliation requires that I obtain a certain amount of continuing education. That means I am occasionally attending seminars and conferences earning hours to apply to that requirement. As a result, I attended a seminar yesterday that dealt with the importance of trees in our urban areas. Sounds like a simple little topic and a little “Duh.” But, as usual, I found it very enlightening and I actually learned something.
We talked about how trees relate to safety, economic, aesthetics, health, and play. They are really an essential part of our urban environment and should be included in the planning of our spaces as we develop new land. All that was sufficiently interesting, but, what really impressed me was the fact that we know so little about what goes on under the ground—the area we can’t see.
There are in fact a lot of misconceptions about what happens under the ground. The lecturer asked for several persons in the audience to come to the front and take a position by very large note pads mounted on easels. The people were instructed to draw a tree, including the root system. Everyone seemed to be able to get the part located above the ground right. They also drew the root system in about the same way. They all drew what we have typically been told was how the root system of a tree looks underground. Although, some of the drawings were a little crude; they got the basics across. Here is an illustration of the standard concept, which we have been taught, of a tree and it’s root system.
I was amazed to find that for all these years I have been operating under the misconception that underground all trees look like that illustration. I would guess that you have too. As you have guessed, that’s not the way it really is. Just like those innocents who heard Galileo’s pronouncement that the earth was round, I was amazed to find that my understanding of the shape of the tree’s root system was not as shown above. The roots are an amazing thatch of shallow leaders reaching far beyond the drip line of the tree, easily twice the radius of the drip line or canopy, as shown in the illustration below.
Folks wonder why the trees begin dying when a new housing development or shopping center is built. Well, a part of the reason is that we don’t have any earthly idea what we are doing when we start digging holes and trenches. Now, isn’t that just a little bit interesting? What this little piece of information does is give me more insight when I help cities develop their ordinances. We can require different construction processes as well as plan where we let stuff be built. Now, there is a lot of stuff that we talked about in the seminar that applies to how we protect the trees and how we position streets, sidewalks, and buildings. I’ll not get into all that. I just thought is was interesting that we generally have a misconception about what goes on under the ground. And, I don’t know about you; but, I am very interesting about the area below the belt.
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