Treelix

It is widely known that rain tends to make ground softer, and wind pushing on trees in soft ground tends to cause said trees to fall over. This Idea is about preventing that.

First, consider the humble roofing nail. It is normally used to hold shingles onto a roof, and they have wide heads because standard asphalt-saturated shingles are made of soft-ish material that can tear around small-headed nails. The invention here requires a wide head, also.

An ordinary screw has a shape that is also called a "helix". When the screw is large-sized it is sometimes called an "auger", but the important thing here is the helical shape. We want a quite-large screw, with a head and a screw- thread that is at least 6 inches (about 15cm) in diameter, and perhaps a couple of yards/meters long. The head of this screw, a Teelix, will have an appropriate way for a tool to be used to make it turn, much like a screwdriver can turn an ordinary screw.

Now let's consider ordinary tree roots, MOST of which radiate from the base of the tree in all directions. The tree may or may not have a "tap root" that grows deeply into the ground, but every time I've seen a fallen tree and looked for a tap root, it doesn't seem to be there. It is certainly not a very large-diameter root.

Compare that to an ordinary wooden telephone pole. I've seen how deep a hole is drilled into the ground, before the pole is inserted --about 1/5 the total length of the pole is underground. Hurricanes don't generally blow telephone poles over --they will snap first, simply because they are so solidly connected to the ground.

Since we want a Treelix to last a long time, it cannot be made of ordinary steel, which rusts and eventually fails. It needs to be made of more-resistant stuff like stainless steel or titanium (both of which are also, usually, biologically inert).

So, near the base of a tree, perhaps half a yard/meter from it, we screw several Treelixes into the ground, evenly spaced around the tree. We want to MISS the major tree roots! We want the wide flat head of this device to hold tree roots down. We want the depth of ground- penetration to be the equivalent of the underground part of a telephone pole, only we are giving the tree several of these connections to the deeper ground, where even if it is soft ground, the force needed to topple the tree goes up considerably.

And so the tree will now be less likely to become a victim of bad weather, and its beauty will last longer. That's all.