I noticed that recent high winds brought down a few trees in the Benefice, and that the fallers seem to have heavy coverings of ivy over the crown. This brought to mind memories of when every Parish had its Roadman, whose job it was to keep roadside hedges and trees in good order. One of his duties was to manage ivy on trees.
Ivy (Hedera helix) is not parasitic but in winter it can act like a sail to bring down trees. It can also help to kill when it competes for sunlight in the tree’s crown during the summer months when leaves need sunlight to photosynthesise.
The age of the Roadman will not return, and so tree owners everywhere need to protect the health of their trees by managing the ivy. Modern experts will give you advice ranging from ‘do nothing’ to ‘kill the ivy in the ground’. For myself, I leave ivy until such times at it starts to fill the tree and then I cut about a foot length out of the stem (usually by then about 20mm diameter) as close to the bottom of the tree as possible. I do this in late autumn and have noticed that it often kills the ivy root.
Conflicting advice from experts however reminds me that over the years I have attended lectures, courses and presentations, and that it has always been my habit to take notes on scraps of paper. (I even do it whilst listening to sermons) This habit means that I have lots of ideas on paper to entertain me in my old age, and one such note reads: “To find facts you ask How. But to find truth you must ask Why.
This thought then brought to mind the Apostles’ Creed (cAD390) which is a key statement of Christian belief. Such a Credo is the opposite of much of what we hear from some clever TV folk. They talk about living their lives based on facts and not belief. But can they really live their lives without belief? Personally I reckon that a belief lies behind most things we do in life even some things we might never consider. Take for example the brand name of products. As a young man I thought that a brand was just a mark of ownership, such as when a rancher branded his cattle. Nowadays however, it is much more than that. In fact a brand name itself now has a value irrespective of who owns it.
But where does that value come from? Some years ago a change was made to accounting rules to allow a company’s balance sheet to contain a monetary value for a brand name. The actual sum being an informed estimate of what the owners thought (believed) the name would be worth. This value assumes customers continue to trust (believe) in the product.
In summary, it then followed that a brand was given a legal (trade marked) entity of its own and could be bought and sold as if it were a product in its own right. However, the value of the brand was still largely based on what both buyer and seller believed the brand meant to the end customer.
Readers wanting to see the scale of belief in brand ownership might view the following website. http://sploid.gizmodo.com/fascinating-graphic-shows-who-owns-all-the-major-brands-1599537576 . It shows who owns what.
Unlike many of those clever folk on TV referred to earlier, I do not think it is possible for people to go through life without believing in something. This being so, the key question for us becomes; what we believe! Like the writers of the Apostles’ Creed many of us think that we find truth by going beyond the ‘how’ questions to also asking the ‘why’ ones.
However, for those folks who find How and Why questions a philosophical conundrum; they may want to ponder why young William aged 8 from Maine on the east coast of the USA and who was studying the ocean, wrote the following; …………
“When ships had sails, they used the trade winds to cross the Atlantic. Sometimes when the wind didn’t blow the sailors would whistle to make the wind come.’ My brother said they would have been better off eating beans.”
View from the Pew 