Here’s my weekly digest of cool stuff. Lots of trees and insects. The weather’s great here in Ohio and crews have been slammed. Stay safe this weekend and enjoy it!

• U.S. scientists still unsure about cause of Colony Collapse Disorder.
• Related: Europe ignores science, bans neonicitinoids anyway.
• Bad news borers: an update on EAB and its recalcitrant cousins.
• Planting ancient trees.
• Book: “New York City of Trees.”
• Above: The first cut of the season at my place. Share your own glamour shots here.

Here’s our weekly round-up of cool stories from the web. Enjoy!

• Bottle gardens.
• Preserving landscaping’s past.
• Flower-powered clock.
• When trees die, people die.
• ValleyCrest replants all the trees it cut down to make way for the shuttle.
• Above: A robot uses a Stihl chainsaw to carve nesting stools out of a log.

As if ash trees didn’t have enough to worry about, now they’re under attack from a deadly fungus that has killed 90 percent of the trees in Denmark.

From the Guardian:

The tree disease Chalara fraxinea has already decimated around 90% of Denmark’s ash population and was found in the UK at a Buckinghamshire nursery in February, raising fears of a repeat of the epidemic of Dutch elm disease in the 1970s, which wiped out virtually the entire mature population of elm trees – 25m – by the 1990s.

Infected trees have since been found at a handful of locations in the UK from outside Glasgow to Cambridgeshire – though not in wild areas outside recent plantings and nurseries – and are being destroyed as they are found. Ash accounts for around a third of our wooded landscape which includes parks and hedgerows, as well as woods and forests.

A ban on imports could come into effect as early as November, just before the planting season, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Thursday, launching a consultation that ends on 26 October.

The environment secretary, Owen Paterson, said: “This disease could have a devastating impact on our native ash trees so we need to take action to stop it. We are working towards a ban on imports, and looking to impose movement restrictions on trees from infected areas.”