Ekspert Trepleie: How tree surgeon made it big in Norway

YOU don’t need to be fluent in Norwegian to guess the translation of Richard Rule’s tree surgery business, Ekspert Trepleie (Expert Treecare), and in the short time I spent with Richard at his home near Oslo I realised the title fits well.

Richard knows his trees. He understands their care and is a bit of a pioneer, bringing English skills – which are probably world-leading in arboriculture – to Norway.

He lives south of the capital in a beautiful home with his partner, family and a lovely Swedish Elkhound called Kira (I’d write ‘Elkhound’ in Norwegian, but am missing the correct Scandinavian characters on my keyboard). Meeting the dog – after Richard kindly picked me up from a ferry terminal – cheered up my slight loneliness. I really miss my dogs when I go away, and the wife too.

Sitting in the strange 20-degree heat just after ‘Norway Day’ on his balcony overlooking Oslofjord, I asked Richard why he moved, though it was patently obvious.

Richard and his Swedish Elkhound Kira. (Image: eA/supplied)

“I wanted my children to grow up somewhere nice, in a safe place where they could be in the wild countryside rather than the urban dangers of London,” he said.

Kira was on a long lead nearby, eating a tree. She is a very big dog and as friendly as her owner, who told me he moved to the area with his Norwegian partner in 2017 to enjoy the freedom and lifestyle of the country.

I, who was headed up north in a few days to the Arctic Circle, wanted to know about the cold, the darkness and the weather in general (I am English, after all).

“Summer can be great, several weeks of sunshine at a time sometimes,” he said.

“But of course winter is tough. Daylight only from 9 am to 3.30 pm and temperatures well below zero with snow, frost, ice and rain in the autumn.” He went on to tell me about a job he had in Bergen where it rains more and he’d suffered a week of continuous downpour.

“I prefer it here, away from the wet coast to the west – plus two degrees in rain is far worse than minus ten with frost.”

Richard’s hobbies of shooting and martial arts, combined with a tough physical job, have left him in good shape for a man of around 50. 

Richard tackles a birch tree. (Image: eA/supplied)

It wasn’t easy, he told me, setting up abroad. He told me of taxation, which is high, to pay for the brilliant social care and infrastructure. We touched on bureaucracy and health and safety, which didn’t seem that much worse than the UK to me.

His business has a woodchipper (Forst), a Toyota truck and the usual array of chainsaws and rigging kit and while he doesn’t employ anyone, he does work closely with a neighbouring forester and other contractors. 

“We work together, share equipment and work according to our skillsets,” he said, making me wonder why there isn’t more of that in this country. We are a bit competitive in the UK. Showing me something on the computer, he complained of numb fingers caused by a saw injury – circular, rather than chainsaw. 

“I was preparing some pallets for gravestone protection for the following day’s job and managed to cut my fingers.” Ouch! They were mangled, but that sort of goes with the job. Along with that injury he also suffered a dislocated shoulder – both obviously a setback.

Richard has worked with cranes a lot. I’ve always admired this. In my day it was less common but is more so now, both at home and abroad, and Richard talked of one particular job, over on the west coast in Bergen, removing trees for a week by felling them in sections and lifting with a crane off a steep hillside to reduce the likelihood of them falling on infrastructure below. 

Richard, like me, is a keen advocate for the protection and care of veteran trees.

Richard’s company, Ekspert Trepleie, specialises in the safe removals of large trees in built-up areas, utilising the latest techniques and hired-in equipment where necessary. (Image: eA/supplied)

“We do a lot of cable bracing,” he said. “There is a tendency sometimes to reduce big trees to limit liability, but cable bracing in both its current forms is often a better solution.” I agreed and despite having done relatively little myself over the years, what I had done worked well. Later, on my own, inside Akershus Fortress in Oslo, I spotted a Cobra brace in an old ash and wondered if it was one of his.

Kira the dog had by now finished eating her tree and was looking like she fancied a spot of moose hunting. “I can’t let her off the leash,” Richard said. “She’d vanish into the woods looking for deer and that’s not allowed around here.”

Apparently it is expensive to fell trees in Norway. “It costs £400 for the application and that is before the licence is issued,” he told me. I almost didn’t write this. It might give our cash-strapped councils ideas …

Richard was trained at Capel Manor and worked in south London, Greenwich, Lewisham and Kent as a contract climber, so asking the man what he missed about home I wasn’t expecting him to mention the scenery. And he didn’t (after all, he isn’t from Wiltshire).

“English humour, food and friends,” he said, thinking about his answer long enough for me to wonder how much he did miss home.

Oddly, I disagree with him about the food. I absolutely love Norwegian cheese, salami, black bread and cod and even managed to drink plenty of black coffee, fed up with explaining that I’d prefer a bit of ‘melk’ in it.

We sat drinking Yorkshire tea, my first proper cup since leaving home (someone at Oslo airport sold me something called ‘chai’, but I’m afraid it isn’t for me, whatever it is).

Back on the topic of tree work, we discussed the relevant qualifications needed for working abroad. “They have a certificate here, the European Tree Worker qualification,” he told me. So far as I understand it, this is a short course in the care and maintenance of trees. I typed it into the search engine and the best information available was under ‘arb jobs’ and it looks like quite a comprehensive course, complete with the slightly alarming sentence, ‘you must be fluent in the language of the country you take the course in’. 

I didn’t research it much, but I think the information is out there in various forums and websites, including the stuff about learning the language, which I tried a bit of during my time in Norway – with limited success.

I asked Richard about the large numbers of wych elms in Oslo and round about the area and whether or not there was evidence of Dutch elm disease. “We help manage the trees, removing dead portions and try to do this when the temperature is lower, to discourage the movement of the beetle,” he stated.

I have read a very small amount about this and the picture is painted bleaker than the reality I saw. There are a lot of wych elms, all mature and all (apparently) doing well. Maybe what I read related to English elms? I felled the last big wych elm in Marlborough in the early 2000s (and made it into a table), so the disease definitely affects these trees.

Maybe the lower temperatures and the proactive measures taken by Richard and other arborists are working? I hope so.

Carefully dismantling a pine tree with a speedline over a private house. (Image: eA/supplied)

There are, apparently, one or two other ex-pat foresters and tree men around Norway, but not many because it isn’t easy to up sticks and set up a business abroad.

I asked Richard about an oak forest nearby that I’d heard merited some sort of title, such as ‘Most northerly continuous oak forest’. I wasn’t sure.

“There’s good mature oak nearby and there is some oak woodland south and west of here,” he said, prompting me to immediately plan an adventure for the very next day.

We talked for a while in the afternoon sun and discussed how expensive it is in Norway to take on employees and that it was better to work symbiotically with other tree people, sharing resources and skills.

We finished our tea and I tried to get a photo of Kira with the Norway flag, but she wasn’t keen, so Richard gave me a lift back to a waiting ferry.

However, I couldn’t shake the idea of an oak forest. So, without wanting to disturb Richard Rule, who presumably didn’t need an early wake-up call, I caught the morning ferry and set off on a bus with a compass and a map to see what I could find.

Now, call me stupid if you like, but I made a terrible mistake. I found the mature oak I was looking for by getting off the bus near a lovely wooden church. I admired some limes, looked at the graves, then set off to find the woodland of oak.

Research of the bus route showed that I could walk happily for a few hours and then catch a bus later, so long as I didn’t stray too far into the woods.

It was hot, I was loving the solitude, the peace and quiet and ticked something off my ‘bucket list’, when two red squirrels popped out of the woods. They move fast, make a fair bit of noise and their frenetic energy makes the greys look a bit lazy and rubbish.

Anyway, they were too fast for me to get a photo so I pressed on, admiring spruce, pine and birch woodland, the occasional oak and lime, elm, willow, poplar and more.

This region of Norway offers plenty of dry working days, with long days in the summer, blue skies and frost in the autumn, but long nights in winter. (Image: eA/supplied)

It was all lovely, but due to ongoing back issues my legs hurt a lot. I wanted to cut north through the ‘wilderness’, but unlike home, there were no paths.

So I promised myself that I’d walk 10 bus stops on the route, each one bringing me closer to the ferry, before I caught the bus for the last few miles. Each stop passed, I didn’t look at the timetable boards or take much notice of the names of each, they were just pull-ins on the forest road. It was uphill, forever. I couldn’t work out how that was possible, to go up all the time and never level off.

Eventually, I decided to see where I was and looked at the list of stops left to the ferry, shocked to discover it was about 14, not four as I expected.

Slowly, it dawned on me what had happened. I should have used my map and compass rather than rely on bus stop lists which are foreign to me even at home. The list got longer for one very obvious reason – they drive on the right in Norway!

It’s complicated to explain, but if you think about it you’ll understand why I was increasing my distance, rather than decreasing it. Not that it made any difference.

Norway provides plenty of variety for a treecare professional and Ekspert Trepleie is regularly called upon to handle the felling of trees in a safe and efficient manner. (Image: eA/supplied)

I just had a much longer ride back, luckily on the same bus I’d got off several hours earlier where the driver had kindly kept hold of my walking stick for me.

I think I either skirted around the oak wood or was looking in the wrong place, but it was all very pleasant and I learned a lot about the trees of southern Norway by experiencing them in real life, as well as listening to what Richard Rule of Ekspert Trepleie told me.

I left the tree surgeon and his adopted homeland with the impression of a nice, quiet family man who’d achieved what he wanted in life, yet still enjoyed doing it, for the love of trees and the excitement that is arboriculture.

Who can blame him for being content?

www.eksperttp.no
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