• LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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    3 hours ago

    Arborists hate Bradford pear trees. They’re the ones that have white flowers and smell like cum. That’s not even why we hate them though.

    • BurningRiver@beehaw.org
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      22 minutes ago

      I had one of these in front of my house, and every spring I wondered why I smelled crusty underwear in my living room. The day I finally had it removed was one of the happiest of my life.

      What’s the reason arborists hate them?

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      I wrote a mobile app years ago for a company that surveyed power lines to figure out what trees had to be cut away. They gave me a list of something like 800 tree species and I was like “do you guys really know what all these trees look like?” They did, it was a very impressive knowledge set.

      A fun fact about power lines in rural areas: property owners generally get compensated monetarily when their trees have to be trimmed for this, and the amount they get is dependent on the species of tree. So the surveyors would usually find all kinds of incredibly exotic shit planted directly under the lines, basically a cash crop for people living in the middle of nowhere. This is probably a huge and under-appreciated factor in the spread of invasive species.

      • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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        18 minutes ago

        It’s an invasive species and they grow with very poor structure so that they basically collapse in a pile of broken limbs after a couple of decades. And the nurseries marketed them heavily for a while so they’re planted everywhere. Pain in the ass to work with.