treeblog - All posts tagged: birch

Downy birch No. 23. In the last Set C downy birch update (Day 426 – 11th May), I was in some doubt as to whether No. 23 was actually alive. In an even earlier update (Day 389 – 4th April), I really did think it had died (along with No. 16). Evidently that was not the case!

Downy birch No. 25: a near-death experience has turned it into treeblog’s only forked birch seedling.

Downy birch No. 28: the shortest of the cohort at approx. 2 cm. A few dead leaves suggest the poor chap has had a brush with death.

treeblog update (Set C, Day 522): the downy birches (Part 1)

It’s been three months since the last treeblog update on the Set C downy birches. They’ve made decent progress since then. See them as they are today (522 days after I planted them as seeds) in this update and see them as they were 96 days ago in the last update on Day 426. Since then downy birch No. 12 has died. That leaves us with sixteen seedlings - Nos. 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28 and 30 – the tallest (No. 1) and shortest (No. 28) of which are about 12 cm and 2 cm tall respectively.

I repotted all the remaining downy birches this afternoon. They were long overdue; many of the seedlings had been paired together in their tiny plant pots since last year, and over the summer loads of self-seeded silver birches had sprung up in the pots. While I was at it I repotted Set A cider gum No. 3 (the Runt), which has been living in the same tiny pot since summer 2007!

Downy birch No. 2 – there was a caterpillar on the stem today, which I relocated onto a mature silver birch. The leading shoot has recently been eaten, probably by the caterpillar!

Some of the seedlings have tiny yellow spots on their leaves, like No. 10 below. I think these are birch rust (Melampsoridium betulinum), a fungus that causes premature defoliation. The fungi produces spores in the spring from last year’s infected leaves that over-wintered in the leaf litter; these spores infect larch needles, and later in the year the larch fungi produce different spores that infect birch leaves. According to Diagnosis of Ill-health in Trees by Strouts & Winter, “This alternation of the fungus between two unrelated host plants is the classic ‘text-book’, full life cycle of a rust fungus.”

That was the first eight seedlings; for the other eight you’ll have to wait ‘til Part 2.

treeblog update (Set C, Day 426): the downy birches

Downy birch No. 1 – one of the very best in class. Notice that the leaves have many lobes.

It’s been over five weeks since the last Set C downy birch update. The last we saw of our little birchy friends, they were mere matchsticks. But throw a little spring into the mix and we’ve got leaves! A wee bit of bad news and a couple of bits of good news: No. 26, alive in the last update, is now dead; No. 16, “dead” in the last update, is now alive; No. 23, “dead” in the last update, might actually be alive… or it might really be dead.

Now before we plough on with the rest of the photos (taken today, 426 days after I planted the Set C birch seeds), I heartily recommend that you take a quick look at the last update – Day 389 - so that you can really appreciate the difference a month makes. Progress may have been a little slow thus far, but once summer kicks in these bad boys should be sizzling.

Nos. 12, 13, 15 and 21 – all sort of common or garden, nothing special, middle-of-the-road seedlings. Nothing wrong with that, right?

No. 30 – one of the better-off middling birches – but notice how few lobes its leaves have compared with the better performers’, like No. 1’s.

The underperformers: Nos. 5, 16 (back from the dead!), 23 (back from the dead?), and 25. New growth (or in the case of No. 23, possible new growth) has been circled.

Coming soon… updates for the Set A Scots pines and cider gums, the goat willow formerly known as PSAUS, the Set D(b) cut-leaved beech, and the Set C(r) and Set D(r) rowans – the Set C(r) rowans are looking awesome!

Spring and decay (24th April 2010)

A European larch (Larix decidua) female flower. The larch roses have arrived later than they did last year, but they were out in force last weekend when I went to check on the progress of the Set A grey alders.

A mature birch polypore a.k.a. razor strop (Piptoporus betulinus) bracket on a fallen downy birch (Betula pubescens). Razor strop fruiting bodies are annual; this is one of 2009’s.

A gnarly, lichen-encrusted rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) twig with unfurling leaves.

A pair of sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) seedlings growing in the fork of a mature sycamore.

treeblog update (Set C, Day 389): the downy birches

Grand news tree fans! Most of the Set C downy birches (Betula pubescens) have made it through the harsh winter and are now beginning to unfurl their first leaves of the year. The last time I posted a Set C birch update, in September, there were twenty-two seedlings left to follow. Today, that number is down to seventeen. Seventeen tiny birches, and you can see photos of each of them below. But first, a little bit of clarification on the current status of each seedling:

Nos. 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 & 30 - These are the seventeen seedlings that are alive and well today, all nicely labelled up in little plant pots, and all on display below for your inspection.
Nos. 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 16, 17 & 23 - These eight seedlings are all dead – but just in case you are morbidly curious as to what dead one-year old downy birch seedlings look like, there are photos of most these below as well. Sick. (No. 7 died sometime between the 25th of May 2009 / Day 75 and the 14th of June 2009 / Day 95; Nos. 6 and 17 died sometime between the 9th of July 2009 / Day 120 and the 19th of September / Day 192; Nos. 3, 9, 11, 16 and 23 all died sometime between Day 192 and Day 389.)
Nos. 8, 18, 19 & 20 - As I’ve decided that treeblog will only follow the first twenty Upper Midhope and Whitwell Moor rowans in Set C(r), so I decided that treeblog would only follow the first thirty birches that had germinated in Set C. When I came to transplant the lucky thirty (marked with little flags) from the horde of anonymous seedlings in the seed tray, some of the thirty (Nos. 8, 15, 19, & 20) could no longer be distinguished from their anonymous brethren. They were… left behind.
No. 29 - When I transplanted the rest of the thirty from the seed tray to plant pots, I left No. 29 behind because it was special and I was fearful of killing it by transplanting it at such an early stage. It was special because it was a rare genetic mutant: a tricotyledonous downy birch, i.e. instead of having two cotyledons it had three. Unfortunately, while it was easy to spot as a tricot when it only had cotyledons, it wasn’t as easy to tell it apart from the rest when it grew its first real leaves. And then it too was lost in the raging horde, sometime between Day 120 and Day 192: perhaps my biggest treeblog regret. Like the other seedlings left behind in the seed tray, it may since have died. Or it could still be alive and well. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this year it will once again stand out from the horde and claim its rightful place by my side!

And now for the dead ones. At least, they certainly have the appearance of being dead. But you never know… Maybe one or two of them will stage an unlikely comeback? Trust no-one!

Dead downy birch No. 9 – photographed yesterday (Day 392), a few days after its fellow cadavers. I, uh, missed it the first time around or something. The blue slug pellets should tell you two things. 1) No. 9 is exceedingly tiny; and 2) Now that winter is over, the slugs and the snails are oot and aboot again so I’m getting Vietnam flashbacks to June 2007, when the Set A seedlings where mullered by slugs. You ain’t getting your 27,000 teeth on my seedlings this time, you malevolent molluscs!

Set C(r) news: On Tuesday (Day 329), three new Upper Midhope rowan seedlings appeared: U3, U4 and U5. Yesterday, (Day 330), a further two Upper Midhope rowan seedlings appeared: U6 and U7. I think I’ll have to transplant the Set C(r) seedlings from the seed tray into plant pots rather soon…

treeblog update (Set A, Day 1102): cider gums. Set C(r) rowans are sprouting!

On parade today are all fifteen Set A cider gums, lined up and ready to be inspected for the first time since August! These poor young eucalypts have been ravaged by the harshest winter for many a year, and it looks as though six of our comrades have fallen (and most of the survivors have frost-damaged tips) – yet there may be still be hope. The previous winter (2008-2009) looked to have dealt fatal blows to cider gums Nos. 3 and 15, but they somehow managed to crawl back from the precipice of the grave. Hardy buggers. Can this miracle be repeated in 2010? (Photographs taken yesterday, 1102 days since I planted Set A.)

Cider gum No. 3 - one of the three Class III runty gums. The dead upper part of No. 3 was killed off by the previous winter, but the winter-just-gone looks to have put paid to its recovery efforts.

Cider gum No. 7 – the tallest of all the cider gums. A real Class I über-gum. It now shares its pot with a brassy young sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) that has recently sprouted.

Cider gum No. 13 – the only treeblog tree still on crutches. Some of the other gums are looking a bit leany or loose in the soil, so support canes will probably be making a comeback.

Cider gum No. 15 - Class III. Has this winter managed what the previous one couldn’t? Poor things looks dead as a door-post.

Set C news: There are Set C(r) rowans sprouting by the bucketload! These beauties will be the subject of the next post, but I’ll tell you right here and now that yesterday I counted thirty-three seedlings in the Whitwell Moor section and two in the Upper Midhope section. I photographed them this afternoon, along with the Set C birches, which are just beginning to put out their first leaves of the new year. treeblog is in a good place!

An early spring wander (21st March 2010) (Part Two)

A dead and rotting silver birch (Betula pendula). I think the little bracket fungi you may be able to make out are birch polypore (Piptoporus betulinus), but they’re pretty poor attempts at fruiting bodies.

This picture is classic Millstones Wood through and through: all rocks and twisty beeches.

This particular beech (Fagus sylvatica) has a splendidly green trunk thanks to a coating of enthusiastic leprose lichen.

I rediscovered this larch (Larix, probs decidua) wound. It hasn’t changed much since the last time I remember seeing it, on the 3rd of January 2008. I first saw the wound on the 4th of April 2007 when it was still very fresh.

Blue sky, shadows, Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris), rocks, and bilberry. What more could you want?

I suppose that to most people this is just a photo of a dirt floor - or more precisely, a photo of a woodland floor covered in old pine needles and bits of pine cone. But I hold a sort of weird fascination for this shining gold-silver pattern.

At one end of Millstones Wood, before it peters out into a grassy, trig-point-topped Salter hill, there grow a few stunted Scots pines and larches. Over the stone wall on the right of this photo there is a field full of gorse (Ulex europaeus) that has recently been completely burned, presumably with a view to control / eradicate it. Whether purposefully or accidentally, the fire spread over the wall where it destroyed several of the stunted pines and seriously singed a few more.

Early this morning, under the cover of fog, treeblog history was made: grey alders Nos. 2 & 3 were released into the wild in a special covert op! Parts 3 & 4 of Operation Alder shall commence next weekend, all being well, and after that I shall produce a post detailing the daring exploits of these guerrilla plantings!

The April 2010 edition – #46 – of the Festival of the Trees is now up at Vanessa’s Trees and Shrubs Blog. Go and drink your fill of this monthly pleasure!

An early spring wander (21st March 2010) (Part One)

A proliferation of small fungal brackets on a dead Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris). They look like turkey tail (Trametes versicolor) - or at least something in that genus - but my encyclopaedia of fungi says that T. versicolor is only found on broad-leaved species. Is that right? Can anyone set us straight in the comments?

The first wood on Whitwell Moor, home to the twin-stemmed beech and rotting Scots pine.

A weak sun shines through the peeling, papery bark of a young downy birch (Betula pubescens).

Goat willows (Salix caprea) are currently putting out their furry catkins. They are dioecious trees – individuals are either male or female – and both sexes produce catkins. At this early stage in their development, I’m not sure whether these catkins are ♀ or ♂.

Alder (Alnus glutinosa) catkins. The long ones in the centre of the photo are the males; these will extend and become golden in colour before they shed their pollen, at which point they will resemble male hazel catkins. The ruby-red, rugby ball-shaped immature female catkins (above the males in this photo) will develop into hard, woody, seed-bearing ‘cones’.

Here they are: the mature female catkins. The three in this photograph would have been at the same stage as those in the previous photo at this time last spring. The cones persist on the tree through winter, lending the leafless alder a distinctive silhouette.

A female hazel (Corylus avellana) flower peeking between two pairs of male catkins.

Just look at all those catkins! There’s even another female flower at the top of the photo! Hazels are amazing at this time of year.

How’s this for a spot of genius? An ash tree (Fraxinus excelsior) seen above and below ground simultaneously!

BudWatch (21st March 2010)

I went out for a wander on Sunday and was slightly disappointed to see such little springly progress from the buds on the locally-growing deciduous trees.

Hazel (Corylus avellana) buds and catkins. The catkins – some folks know them as lambs’ tails – are made up of male flowers. A female flower is hiding in the upper-centre of this photo.

English oak (Quercus robur). I’ve noticed that the terminal buds are often flanked by a pair of smaller buds, although the terminal bud in this photo has lost one of its two buddies. (It’s the Lonely Oak!)

Larch (probably European larch, Larix decidua) pegs and a ‘bud’ of some sort – maybe a flower very early on in development? I was very disappointed to find that there were no larch roses on this tree at all; this time last year they were out in force!

Goat willow (Salix caprea). On some of the trees catkins were already forming! I noticed that the buds on the trees with catkins were a light green while the trees without catkins had reddish buds (as in the above photo). Is this a way to tell the male trees from the female trees?

Here’s a wee hawthorn story: I was at college today, being taught how to use Tirfor winches in the context of stump removal. It is an agricultural college, and someone in the equestrian section pointlessly wanted a small section of hawthorn hedge, about five metres long, removing from a little patch of grass next to the stables. It was the remnant of a hedgerow that was mostly destroyed when the stables were built – a hedgerow probably laid down hundreds of years ago. Our instructor, an arboricultural legend (who shares my view that it is a great shame to get rid of something planted so long ago), reckoned it probably dated from the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps from medieval times; possibly, if it was Midland hawthorn (Crataegus laevigata), it may have dated from as far back as the tenth century! The roots were certainly grand old things.

European beech (Fagus sylvatica). The buds are easily identified with their long and pointy ways. ‘Cigar-shaped’, some say.

And of the buds of other locally-growing tree species that I saw up close but are MIA from this post… Common ash (Fraxinus excelsior) buds showed no signs of opening yet, sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) buds were green and swelling, and elder (Sambucus nigra) – I saw a couple of elders with closed buds but one growing on a south-facing slope was covered in tiny green leaves, yippee!

Birch catkins. FotT #45.

The forty-fifth edition of the Festival of the Trees, Voice, is now online at The Voltage Gate. Go and enjoy it!

treeblog has been included in a list of ‘50 Amazing Nature Photography Bloggers’. If that sort of thing floats your boat, go and check it out.

First signs of spring: alder and hazel catkins. A brief update on the treeblog trees.

Winter’s grip on the countryside is finally loosening! The weather may still be nasty, but the days are getting longer and the local alders and hazels have been blasting out their male catkins. The hazels in particular look rather spiffing, their pale yellow lambs’ tails creating welcome splashes of colour in an otherwise bleak treescape.

More male hazel catkins, or lambs’ tails. These photos were taken beside Broomhead Reservoir on Tuesday.

This year’s developing male catkins (cigar-shaped) and last year’s woody female catkins (egg-shaped) on an overhead alder (Alnus glutinosa) branch.

And now for a brief update on the treeblog trees, neglected on this blog for far too long. Sad face.

The two Scots pines look fine. The four grey alders are covered in buds; the top of grey alder No. 4 is dead, as suspected in September. Most of the cider gums look alright, although a few of them have picked up a bit of a lean. Cider gums Nos. 1 and 15 look like they have suffered some serious frost damage. Will they survive? No. 15 took a lot of frost damage last year and survived… The post-Set A goat willow (the seedling formerly known as PSAUS) has some nice big buds.

Most of the downy birches have just started opening their tiny little buds. A few of them may have died, and some of them look to have had their roots exposed over the winter, so some replanting may be in order this weekend.

Set C’s downy birch No. 2 on Tuesday (16th February – 342 days after planting), standing a fine one-inch tall.

None of the sweet chestnuts or beechnuts, planted in the autumn, have sprouted yet. I’m aiming to plant my rowan seeds, the other component of Set D, in March. They are currently undergoing pretreatment.

Festival of the Trees 44

Hello friend! Welcome to the February 2010 edition of the Festival of the Trees, hosted with gracious humility by treeblog. It’s time to take another walk through Festival Forest, so please dress in suitable attire. Quickly pack yourself some refreshments too – tea and biscuits, beer and a Scotch egg, whatever – and then we can get off in time to see the forest sunrise. Maybe we’ll see the trees lit up like the little Appalachian glow that Carolyn of Roundtop Ruminations saw last week.

O-ho! What rustles? A friendly badger approaches! What’s it got for us? A piece of parchment? Ah, it’s a map of Festival Forest, annotated by one of the Forest Guardians, Jade Blackwater. These green ‘X’s must be things she wants us to take a look at. Yep, these’ll fit into our walk nicely. The first one isn’t too far in this direction, so we might as well make it our first port of call… Aye, there’s a note attached to this tree. It’s a letter – sorry – it’s a poem entitled, Tu B’Shvat, by Rebecca of Rebecca’s Raps.

All photos in this post are Creative Commons-licensed and were found on Flickr.

Now, see that tree over there? That’s a myrtle beech. Over at Tasmanian Plants, David takes a look at how this tree from that island’s cool temperate rainforest managed to survive the most recent glacial period. And that scrub oak next to it? Greg of Greg Laden’s Blog tells us how a scrub oak in southern California has survived for an estimated 13,000 years by cloning itself. At that age it would have been a seedling in the last ice age, back when the myrtle beech was still chilling in refugia!

That tree by the stream is a western redcedar. It isn’t a true cedar though – it actually belongs to the cypress family. Western redcedar is the subject of a comprehensive post for The Clade by Rachel Shaw.

I don’t know what those twisting, barkless trees over there are, but I know that A. Decker has some drawings of them at Resonant Enigma. When it comes to identifying trees, things just got a bit easier for visitors to Riverside Park – the trees have now got little tags with their common and taxonomic names on, as Melissa of Out walking the dog discovered recently.

This part of the Forest is a lot colder than the rest (I hope you brought a coat). That freezing creek could have been the inspiration for Angie’s haiga at woman, ask the question. And that hoar frost… the way it transforms the leaves and the bark and the grass and everything is just magical. It’s not just the Forest either – take a look at Silvia’s photos of her wintry back garden at Windywillow. Kitty has another couple of frost photos at Into My Own.

Hard frozen ground plus dormant trees plus a prolonged episode of rainfall can all add up to a flash flood, something that occurred in Dave Bonta’s neck of the woods recently at Via Negativa. To top it off, the temperature dropped and the floodwaters froze!

The frost here is pretty deep. Er, it’s snow. Pretty deep snow. Outside the Forest, Chestnut Coppice and Sweep Wood took a decent hit of snow – Mike’s got a hefty photo-record over at Peplers in Rye. Eped of fish without faces has arranged some very wintrous photos of the infamous Donner Pass, whose subjects include staghorn lichen and the incredible-impossible phenomenon of snow rollers!

Isn’t this Forest strange? We’re barely taken a hundred steps from the snow and already there’s a flowering tree that closely resembles the pink poui in Gillena Cox’s webshots album, Scenery & Nature: Trees Bloom.

Some trees hold secrets… swamp4me at SwampThings shares a live oak with a mysterious wound. Who or what inflicted it and why? Is everything what it seems? All we know is, the tree lives on... What if a tree grew up next to a barbed wire fence and grew around the barbed wire, but at some later date the fence was taken down to leave behind a secret section of barbed wire buried deep inside the heart of the tree? Vicky reveals the secret at TGAW.

Hey. You feeling the bad vibes in this area? Those stumps over there were once healthy trees. I hate it when trees in the Forest have to be cut down, but the powers that be can be ignorant or unfair. Luigi at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog laments that his mother-in-law was forced to cut down some of her eucalypt plantation in Kenya under a government initiative to combat drought. Sometimes a tree has to come down in the interests of public safety, even if it’s a grand old vet. Michelle of Rambling Woods tells the sad story of Herbie, a victim of Dutch elm disease and New England’s oldest elm tree.

Have you ever noticed that some trees resemble animals? Somewhere in this forest there’s a silver birch that looks like a reindeer, and Shashi has a lizardy reptile-tree at his anAestheticbard photoblog. Speaking of birch trees, Sheridan at Willow House Chronicles recounts a Native American legend that explains the branch scars on birches with the story of Winabojo, a spirit-boy.

Hold on a sec, there’s an arrow made of sticks on the ground here! That’ll have been left by Dave Bonta, one of the Forest Guardians. Where does it point? At that tree down there with its bole all swathed with strips of material? That reminds me of a line from Marly Youmans’ poem A Tree for Ezekiel at qarrtsiluni.

Let’s just rest for a minute by this maple. I want to show you its twigs. Do you see those little wrinkles? Well, Seabrooke at the Marvelous in nature explains how by finding those wrinkles you can not only determine the age of a twig or branch, but also how much the twig or branch has grown in each year.

There was once a road that ran through the Festival Forest, but that was a long time ago. Today you could walk right by without noticing that a road was ever there. Once it fell out of use, the forest just swallowed it up. Rudyard Kipling poetised a very similar story in The Way Through The Woods, a fine poem to which Jasmine of Natures Whispers has added some fitting imagery.

You know, I never cease to be amazed by the sheer diversity of the trees here in Festival Forest. Over there are oaks, but over there are palm trees! The dedicated iphoneographer Bruce Moore shares a moody photos of a palm over at brucecmoore iPhone photos. When you say ‘palm tree’, I think ‘coconut’. If it’s a red hot day in the Dominican Republic and you fancy a refreshing drink of coconut milk, someone might just climb up and fetch you one. Moe at Iowa Voice has the photos! Still, not everyone likes palm trees. If only the haters would read Jacqueline’s passionate defence of palm trees at SAVING OUR TREES. The Alexandra Palm in her back garden is way more than just a ‘telegraph pole’ – it’s a valuable food source for birds and a possum!

And still with the palms, when Billy Goodnick saw a fig intertwined with a palm tree he got a little hot under the collar in this article at Fine Gardening. Mr Goodnick also gets excited about the colours of the leaves in autumn at Santa Barbara Edhat. I was apparently misinformed when I was told that deciduous trees turn yellow and orange and red because forest dwellers paint the leaves by the light of a full moon.

Jade Blackwater of Arboreality spent several months of 2008 living in Santa Barbara. Living next to a warm, sandy beach is all well and good, but if you’re a forest-dweller it might take some getting used to.

Are you a bonsai person? Or have you tried to keep one in the past? John Conn (b0n2a1) curates a gallery of spectacular specimens on Flickr called Bonsai.

The bare trees in this part of the forest are great to photograph against a beautiful, clear, blue sky on a fresh winter’s day. I’m sure Susan of Garden Rant would agree. A moody sky can work as well, like in these photos at Wanderin’ Weeta, snapped by the eponymous wanderer herself. A different approach to these bare trees delivers results just as pleasing, as Karen at trees, if you please demonstrates: photographing the shadows that the naked trees cast along the floor.

I can’t tell what flavour these trees are without their leaves on, but I’m pretty sure that they aren’t baldcypresses. I should be able to identify those in winter now after reading Genevieve’s post at Tree Notes. Actually, tell a lie - I do know what this tree is. Do you see those spiky balls hanging there? They’re sweet gum seed balls. I learned about these recently from Katie at Green-Wood Cemetery Trees.

Let’s stop by this pine tree for a moment and take a close look at one of these pine cones. These little winged structures wedged into the cone hold the seeds – Roberta will tell you more at Growing With Science Blog.

Have you ever fallen in love with a tree? Heather Cameron of A day in the Country has. Actually, she fell in love with a forest. AnneTanne of AnneTannes Kruidenklets fell in love with the English oak growing in the cornfield that neighbours her house. When the field came up for sale, guess what happened? I’m sure you’d do the same to keep the tree that you love safe.

Woah! That giant growth on that tree there! That is one fine burr. Almost as big as the one JSK saw on her ‘campground – dam loop’ walk at Anybody Seen My Focus?

I’ve heard that there are many old marker stones lost in this forest. Caroline at Coastcard tells of the Rufus Stone in the New Forest. The original stone was erected in 1745 to mark the site of an ancient oak tree, itself the site of a much older event: the death of a king in August 1100.

Shhh!. Stand still a minute and look where I’m pointing. Up in that Scots pine. A red squirrel. Red squirrels are native to Scotland, but they are under threat from the introduced grey squirrel, as Kevin of Fraoch Woodland will tell you.

Can you smell that salty tang in the air? We’ve walked right through Festival Forest and we’re about to come out onto a beach. There’s a flotsam- and jetsam-decorated tree (deceased) standing in the ocean that Nina of Ornamental will show you. And there’s just one last surprise before we get there: dancing clouds.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed your journey today (or however long it took us – time in this forest passes strangely). I think the best way to bring it all to a close would be to solemnly quote these words of wisdom from Pablo of Roundrock Journal:

I just like the idea of knowing that the forest is a busy place even when we’re not around. And it reminds me that there is always something interesting to see in the forest if I just take the time to look for it.

Super. There are just two things left to say:
1. Thank-you to everyone who contributed to this edition of the Festival of the Trees, and thank-you again to Dave Bonta for forwarding on a lot of submissions, and Jade Blackwater for going the extra mile with her submissions. It’s been a pleasure.
2. Next month’s Festival of the Trees (#45) will be over at The Voltage Gate. Send in your submissions to thevoltagegate [at] gmail [dot] com. The deadline is the 26th of February.

Toodleoo-the-noo!

Pests, diseases, disorders, competing growth and unfavourable conditions (a field trip): the diseases

Last Thursday my arboriculture class set out from college on a field trip to see a smörgåsbord of pests, diseases, disorders, competing growth and unfavourable conditions afflicting a variety of trees in the vicinity of York and Malton. Some of them were new to me, most I were already aware of, but it was a highly interesting way to spend a day and we got to see some cracking trees. Here’s a quick run-through of the diseases that we saw:

Supermassive sycamore (this photo falls a long way short of doing it justice) with decayed Dryad’s saddles. The one on the floor has fallen off the tree.

Dryad’s saddle (Polyporus squamosus) – A bracket fungi. Described in Jordan’s Fungi ¹ as “Large, creamy-brown scaly cap with cream pore-bearing under-surface, annual; parasitic on broad-leaf trees, also on stumps, favouring beech, elm and sycamore.” We only saw old and decaying specimens, but the sycamores (Acer pseudoplatanus) they had grown on were jaw-droppingly colossal - easily the biggest I’ve seen! These ancient sycamores formed an avenue along a road near Birdsall House. I’ve got to go back and get some decent photos of them in the summer before they collapse or get felled for safety reasons.

Dutch elm disease – The Big Baddie. The current epidemic is caused by the fungus Ophiostma novo-ulmi, spread by elm bark beetles of the genus Scolytus. It is the most catastrophically devastating tree disease ever recorded in British history. On the field trip we saw a dead elm (Ulmus) replete with bark beetle galleries in the wood beneath the bark.

Canker – There are various kinds of cankers and a variety of causes of cankers. Strouts and Winter ² define a canker as a “clearly defined patch of dead and sunken or malformed bark”. We saw cankers on sycamore and red horse chestnut (Aesculus x carnea) - a hybrid amusingly described in the Collins Tree Guide ³ as a tree of “rather endearing ugliness”.

Birch polypore or razor strop (Piptoporus betulinus) – Another bracket-producing fungus, it is restricted to birch (Betula). We saw loads of razor strops on dead and drying silver birches (Betula pendula) in a small piece of woodland that has become waterlogged as a consequence of mining subsidence.

Ganoderma - A genus of bracket- (polypore) producing fungi that is parasitic on broad-leafed species. We saw a large, dead Ganoderma at the base of a huge and ancient English oak (Quercus robur), but we didn’t identify it to species level. The oak was extremely diseased and its days are sadly numbered.

Slime flux or bacterial wetwood – A bacterial infection causing the host to ooze infected sap from wounds or apparently healthy bark. According to Strouts and Winter ², bacterial wetwood is “common yet rarely results in overt disease”.

Inonotus hispidus - Another polypore-producer that is parasitic on broad-leaves, particularly ash (Fraxinus excelsior). We saw several dead brackets on an ivy-covered ash growing by a stream.

Hoof fungus or tinder bracket (Fomes fomentarius) – Like you’d expect, the brackets of this fungus look like hooves. It favours birch – its modus operandi is similar to that of razor strop. We saw several of these brackets on the waterlogged birches.

¹ Jordan, M. (2004). The Encyclopedia of Fungi of Britain and Europe. Frances Lincoln.
² Strouts, R. G. and Winter, T. G. (2000). Diagnosis of ill-health in trees. The Stationary Office.
³ Johnson, O. and More, D. (2006). Collins Tree Guide. HarperCollins Publishers.

The snow persists (10th January 2010) (Part 2)

Last Sunday when snow blanketed the country I thought it would be awesome if I could get up onto the moors to see Ewden Force, which was sure to be one sweet icicle fest. That turned out to be slightly over-ambitious. Once I got off the beaten path and onto the landrover track that goes up to the Broomhead shooting lodge the going got tough. The snow came to just below my knee and in places was up to the top of my legs! It was a super tough slog up the hill to the lodge but it felt like a real achievement once I made it one step at a time. There was only an hour of daylight left after my snow-slowed progression, so I turned my back on the unreachable frozen waterfall wonder and with a slightly heavy heart and a very cold face retraced my lonely footprints. I was within one and a half kilometres of Ewden Force at the shooting lodge, but it might as well have been a thousand miles away. By the time I’d have gotten there it would have been dark and I would have perished in the wilderness or something. It would also have been rather dangerous: I’ve fallen down holes on the moors in broad daylight so who knows what you’re going to be falling down with all that snow concealing the true lay of the land? So no Ewden Force. Disappointing.

It rained on Friday and Saturday – proper rain for the first time in weeks! – and washed away most of the snow. There are weather rumours that it may snow again mid-week (the BBC is forecasting heavy snow for Thursday)… and for much of February.

A walk through Yew Trees Lane Wood (Part One)

This set of photos isn’t very recent. I took them three weeks ago, on the 26th of September – the day I collected cut-leaved beech nuts for treeblog Set D. It was a beautiful, beautiful day.

Entering Yew Trees Lane Wood from the fields, you are plunged into an amazing environment of dense foliage and huge pine trunks.

It may not look very big in this photo, but the tree in the centre is a very tall, very straight beech (Fagus sylvatica). It’s a cracking specimen!

treeblog update (Set C, Day 192): the downy birches

It‘s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here: the treeblog Set C update that you’ve been missing! Take a gander at the surviving downy birches as they were yesterday, 192 days after I planted them as seeds. Actually, there is no photo of downy birch No. 29 – the tricot – because I no longer know which seedling is No. 29. I presume it’s still alive, but the seed tray where it yet resides is chock-a-block with wee birch seedlings and No. 29 is lost in the horde. That is a problem needing solving.

Going back in time, I decided that treeblog would only follow the first thirty birches to germinate, seeing how so bloody many did. The lucky few would be Nos. 1 to 30 with the exception of Nos. 8, 18, 19 and 20 (who were lost in the horde as far back as May). Downy birch No. 7 then died around the beginning of June, and since the last update on the 9th of July (Day 120) a further two have kicked the bucket: Nos. 6 and 17.

So twenty-three of the seedlings are still going (but No. 29 is lost for the moment). Nos. 9 and 11 appear to be on their way out: they are looking very sickly. Nos. 1, 2 and 25 are looking like the best of the bunch at the moment, and Nos. 3, 23, 27, 28 and 30 are looking fairly poor. In general, the downy birches have not grown very much at all over the last two and a half months.

Downy birches Nos. 9, 10, 11 and 12. Nos. 9 and 11 appear to be in their death throes.

A wee bit of bonus Set A news now. The last fortnight has been very dry, and while the treeblog trees have been kept supplied with water, grey alder No. 4 appears to have been sunburned. The new leaves on the leading shoots are either dead or with dead patches, and the leading shoot itself appears to have died – it feels stiffer than it ought to and is looking more brown than green. This would be the third alder to lose its leader this year; only No. 1 would be left with a perfect main stem.

Habitat restoration in Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve

I recently returned from a week in the Highlands where I stayed in a cottage in Glen Lyon, just over an hour’s drive from Killin and Loch Tay. On Sunday the 2nd I walked up Beinn Ghlas (1103 m / 3620 ft) and Ben Lawers (1214 m / 3984 ft), two of the local Munros (mountains over 3000 feet). Most of the main path is within the Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve, a 4,722 ha area of land encompassing the southern slopes of the Lawers and Tarmachan ranges owned and cared for by the National Trust for Scotland.

Adapted from the National Trust for Scotland’s Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve page:

… [The] Reserve [is] especially important for the arctic-alpine flora, and is also of international importance. We manage it in collaboration with Scottish Natural Heritage, to achieve a wide range of conservation objectives [including] the long-term survival of the native species of plant and animal and their habitats… some of the habitats are now so rare and vulnerable that extinction is either imminent of inevitable if we do not act to prevent it. Much of our work is designed to reverse such a process, with ‘species recovery’ and ‘habitat restoration’. For example, you can se the first British attempt to restore montane willow scrub, a rare and declining habitat in Scotland, as part of a continuum also including herb-rich birchwood. [A] Nature Trail is mostly within an ‘enclosure’ fence, within which the vegetation is recovering from the heavily grazed condition still seen outside the fence. Many of the trees and shrubs have been planted during the 1990s, but some of them, and the herbaceous plants, have regenerated without such intervention.

This photo shows the enclosed area mentioned in the above passage – it’s the reddish-brown patch in the centre of all that green. The green is mainly grass and low-growing herbs that are tolerant of being grazed by sheep and deer. The enclosed area is a different colour because a more natural flora has been allowed to regenerate thanks to the deer fencing – it appears reddish-brown from a distance because a lot of the ground cover is currently made up of heathers and flowering grasses. The mountain in the background is Beinn Ghlas; it obscures Ben Lawers.

The concentrated sheep grazing since the 18th century, and increasingly large deer populations now [deer have no natural predators since the wolf was hunted to extinction in the 17th or 18th century], have had a profound effect on the vegetation. Trees, shrubs and tall herbaceous plants cannot survive and regenerate and are now confined to cliff ledges. Farmers have rights to graze their sheep on Trust land on the Ben Lawers range, but the red deer is a native of the hills and its presence is important to the land. However, numbers are such that seedling trees cannot escape the many hungry mouths, so culling of deer is carried out on the reserve.

[Taken from a leaflet available to download from the National Trust for Scotland’s Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve page.]

Several silver birch (Betula pendula) saplings and a rowan sapling (Sorbus aucuparia) – far right – growing amongst heather, ferns and lichen (the creamy-white patches) inside the enclosure. Much nicer than a vast, monotonous expanse of overgrazed grassland, innit. As well as birch and rowan, I saw plenty of willow growing; the Burn of Edramucky flows through the enclosure and you know how willow loves its water.

A wee rowan rising above tall, flowering grass; something you just don’t see outside of the enclosure.

The view south over the beautiful Loch Tay from the enclosure. I ♥ the Highlands.

This horsetail (Equisetum sp.) – a “living fossil” - is also benefiting from the habitat restoration scheme. I found this one growing with its friends by a waterfall.

Looking back through the enclosure towards Beinn Ghlas. The day started off overcast and drizzly, but by late afternoon the weather turned lovely for the ascent.

Featuring in the next few posts: photos of the Set A and Set C trees; a huge spruce and a money tree; a huge ash and a hoary rowan; & some big mushrooms and a big bracket fungus!

Out on the moors: to Pike Lowe and beyond! (Part Two)

I was out walking on the moors last Saturday, and in Part One of this two-part post I’d just walked across Whitwell Moor, through Millstones Wood, and over Broomhead Moor to Pike Lowe...

After a bit of a dinner stop at that ancient cairn, I headed south to intercept the upper course of the Ewden Beck, I almost perfectly landed upon what I’d come looking for. Right next to the confluence of the beck with an unnamed (on the map) tributary from Stainery Clough, there is an impressive waterfall. (A second, smaller waterfall is to the left of the main fall, where the Stainery Clough stream drops into the beck, but it’s hidden by bracken in my photo.) Two things about this fine waterfall: 1. It is orange! - a consequence of the very peaty water. 2. It is bigger than it looks in this photo, which was taken zoomed in from the top of a steep bank overlooking the river. I reckon the face of the fall to be about three metres tall. There is an excellent photograph on Flickr by Peter Bell, taken on May 30th this year, that gives a much better idea of the true height of the waterfall. It also shows a much denuded flow; my photo was taken after a prolonged rainy spell, so the Ewden Beck was in full flow, and judging by the flattened vegetation along the river edge the water had been a foot higher in places after a big storm during the night. The waterfall isn’t named on the map – it isn’t even on the map (1:25,000 OS) – so I’m calling it Ewden Force. I’m sure some locals have a name for it already. I wonder what?

So after finding a good place to confidently cross the swollen Ewden Beck upstream of the waterfall, and then crossing the Stainery Clough stream, I walked east over the moor (south of and parallel with Ewden Beck) towards the shooting lodge I visited on the 21st of March. Between Stainery Clough and the lodge, I had to cross another two significant cloughs and their swollen streams. One was Oaken Clough, which looks quite meaty on the map, contours-wise; the other, of similar size to Oaken Clough in real life, is unnamed on the map where the contours barely bend for it! Anyway, there are a number of small unnamed streams either side of Oaken Clough, so I couldn’t tell which of the two big cloughs was Oaken Clough because of the dodgy cartography. Either way, all the cloughs were devoid of oaks; a much better name for Oaken Clough would be Rowan Clough.

Heading down into one of the cloughs. Rowans (Sorbus aucuparia) ahead, stream to the left, grassy ancient path to the right. Bear in mind that this is in the middle of nowhere, with no footpaths anywhere near it. There can’t be many people ever walk here, but sometime in the past, probably hundreds of years ago, there was a way down here that was important enough for someone to go to the trouble of creating a stone-edged path down to the stream, probably to ford it. Perhaps you can make out some of the mossy edging stones on the left side of the path; to the right, off the photograph, is a steep bank that is supported with a sort of stone wall. Very old, very gone-back-to-nature. I almost walked along it without even realising what it was. I really need a GPS device to record the location of these things so that I’ll never forget where they are.

Developing rowan berries. Not ripe just yet, but in another few weeks all of the local rowans will be covered in clusters of bright red berries.

More rowans! It’s rowan heaven up here in these wee cloughs all surrounded by moorland. Many of the trees were practically dripping with lichens; it was like being up in the Highlands.

Heading down into the other decent-sized clough, this: the biggest-girthed rowan I have ever seen. I knew it was a special one as I eyed it from a distance. A sheep track led straight to it, so our ovine friends use it as a landmark. Well over a metre in diameter (I’ll need to come back for some DBH action), the tree had split in half with its still-healthy branches spanning quite an area. There was also a lot of dead wood scattered around its vicinity; it must have been quite an explosive collapse!

It wasn’t just the tree that was huge. Some of the lichens were beasts, like this monster growing on one of the branches.

In the bottom of a clough, this unusual sight. A rowan and a birch growing hip to hip on the stream bank.

And on the way home from this magical journey of cairn, clough and waterfall, a familiar feature: the eastern Salter Hill. (See it here on the 3rd of April and here on the 1st of June.)

treeblog update (Set C, Day 120): the downy birches; Grey alder No. 3 beheaded

Yesterday afternoon, 120 days after the planting of treeblog Set C, I spent some time photographing the twenty-five downy birches. Since the last update in mid-June (Day 95), most of the seedlings have grown a second proper leaf and are now working on a third. Some of them are outperforming the rest (e.g. No. 21) and some are rather underperforming (e.g. No. 17); some look in rude health (e.g. No. 5) and some look rather sickly (e.g. No. 12); but there have been no losses in the three-and-a-half weeks since the last update. For this, the Day 120 update, Downy birch No. 1 has already got us started (I recommend checking out its photo-timeline) – the rest of the squad have formed ranks below and are standing to attention awaiting your inspection. (Most of the seedlings are sprinkled with sand and soil particles splashed there by heavy rains, but that’s nothing to worry about.)

Downy birches Nos. 6, 9, 10 and 11. No. 9 has only just developed its first true leaf. Lagger!

Downy birches Nos. 16, 17, 21 and 22. No. 17’s another underperformer but No. 21 is doing great.

Downy birches Nos. 27, 28, 29 and 30. No. 29 – the tricot – is doing well. It’s still in the birch seed tray for the time being.

In other news… Set A’s grey alder No. 3 was beheaded last weekend by these nasty, secretive pests that have been plaguing the alders for weeks. No. 4 was almost beheaded in mid-May, No. 2 was beheaded in mid-June… and now No. 3. The photo below shows the not-quite-fully-severed leading shoot hanging limply to one side. Unbearable.

treeblog update (Set C, Day 95): twenty-five downy birches

Yesterday – June 14th – was the ninety-fifth day since I planted birch seeds, sweet chestnuts and rowan berries as treeblog’s Set C. To date, it appears that only the birches have met with any success. Back on the 10th of May (Day 60), I transplanted twenty-five of the birch seedlings from their seed tray into small pots. These lucky few – plus a tricotyledonous birch seedling I left in the seed tray – are all the birch seedlings treeblog will follow. Many, many more birches germinated besides, but I don’t have the room to grow on all of those!

Five weeks on from the transplanting, and only one of the transplantees has died – No. 7. It wasn’t looking very good at the time of the last birch update (Day 75 / May 25th). Back then, I still wasn’t completely sure whether these birches were downy or silver. I’ve since been back to look at the parent tree again, and I’m now confident that it is a downy birch (Betula pubescens). There might be a post to be made out of that!

Downy birches Nos. 6, 9, 10 and 11. No. 9. Poor old No. 9 is the least developed of the lot – it’s hardly changed in three weeks! No. 6 has also been unfortunate. It had fallen over, hence its vertically-aligned leaf.

Downy birches Nos. 23, 24, 25 and 26. No. 24 had also fallen over; No. 23 is another poor developer.

The Set C birch seed tray and the anonymous horde! No. 29 is in there, just right of centre. You’ll probably need to click on the photo and look at the bigger version to better make out the seedlings.

birch

treeblog update (Set C, Day 522): the downy birches (Part 2)

treeblog update (Set C, Day 522): the downy birches (Part 1)

treeblog update (Set C, Day 426): the downy birches

Spring and decay (24th April 2010)

treeblog update (Set C, Day 389): the downy birches

treeblog update (Set A, Day 1102): cider gums. Set C(r) rowans are sprouting!

An early spring wander (21st March 2010) (Part Two)

An early spring wander (21st March 2010) (Part One)

BudWatch (21st March 2010)

Birch catkins. FotT #45.

First signs of spring: alder and hazel catkins. A brief update on the treeblog trees.

Festival of the Trees 44

Pests, diseases, disorders, competing growth and unfavourable conditions (a field trip): the diseases

The snow persists (10th January 2010) (Part 2)

A walk through Yew Trees Lane Wood (Part One)

treeblog update (Set C, Day 192): the downy birches

Habitat restoration in Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve

Out on the moors: to Pike Lowe and beyond! (Part Two)

treeblog update (Set C, Day 120): the downy birches; Grey alder No. 3 beheaded

treeblog update (Set C, Day 95): twenty-five downy birches

birch

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