Friday 30 November 2012

The wonderful oaks along the college drive!

This is one of the younger oak trees along the drive, towards Garrard House, maybe over fifty years old, vigorous and in good health.


This tree in the picture below is quite a bit older, middle-aged perhaps, and has not had an easy time of it. It has now been greatly reduced to provide greater safety to passers-by. This should allow it to be retained for many more years to come, although probably not all the way through its natural lifespan.


This next picture is of one of the best trees in the whole parish, an old giant of an oak that sits just outside Garrard House, and must be well over 100 years old.





































This lovely oak opposite the staff car-park entrance has been heavily pruned in the past. The large boll on the left shows several apparently flush pruning cuts of what appears to be secondary branching that have no signs of later callusing over, although they are now very much hidden in the surface of the main trunk.



This picture below is an example of a very large branch having been removed. The tree made valiant efforts to heal itself, and there is a good roll of callus in a nicely circular surround over the wound. The decay in the heartwood in the centre however was pretty inevitable when making such a large wound, and removing such a large branch, and really the only way to avoid this is to think fifty years or so ahead, and do your formative pruning while the branch is still small!

The surface of the decaying heartwood looks as though it has been covered with black wound paint - the wood below looks much paler - now very much out of favour, although it was very much in vogue up to about 15 years ago. It is now thought to do more harm than good.







It is however interesting to compare the picture above with the one below, a large wound, which does not show any sign of wound paint applied, that has healed pretty well on the Garrard House oak - although not too many conclusions should be drawn as there are so many factors involved.


More Scots Pine further up the drive

This picture, taken looking very high up towards the top of one of the Scots Pine trees along the upper part of the drive, shows a typical "rip-out" scar of a dropped branch from surprisingly high up in the canopy. Its such a shame that such a high branch has been lost and its a bit difficult to imagine how it happened!

I had never noticed this following structural difference before, only the obvious colour change as you go up the trunk! This picture shows the often typical reddish scaly bark found higher up the trunks of the trees, as opposed to the scaly fissured bark found lower down the trunk (lower picture).










In the picture above of the bark at chest height, you also have the green algae growing on the North side, on the left. On the right hand side you can see more of the proper colour of the scales, but the bark is never as smooth or as orange as the smooth scales near the top of the tree, and the bark is more a mid-brown at its warmest.

The Scots Pine trees further along the drive do look subtly different, from the ones nearer the A26. They seem to me to far wiggly in their trunks and branches. Here are some wiggly branches high up in the canopy;



and here are some bendy tips to the trunks - very odd!



Overall most of the trees higher up the drive look a bit bendy and wiggly as in the picture below, if you look closely at the way the branches have developed.



and the trunk of the young one on the right in the picture below just doesn't seem to know what on earth it is doing!



This last picture (below) shows what looks like woodpecker damage high up on an apparently healthy branch. I am not sure what other explanation there could be for this (apart from climber damage), and the branch does overhang a target - the college main drive - so it could be worth keeping an eye on. Some of the branch has been apparently quite deeply pecked into, and some other areas of surface bark apparently levered up. It all fits with a woodpecker trying to get at insects inside the branch, but there is no sign of ill-health in the branch foliage, so maybe it will remain a mystery!




Thursday 29 November 2012

Scots Pine along the College Drive on the first real day of winter

I spent a chilly hour this afternoon walking Monty around the front of the college campus and took a few photos.

The Scots Pines along the main college drive are a real structural and heritage feature of the college environment, and the older ones are absolutely fantastic trees, certainly well over 50 years old, some possibly much older. Many of them are suffering from the damage and disease implicit on this site where the trees and landscape are not really heavily prioritised by the senior management (despite the best efforts of the Head Gardener) and are very unlikely to achieve their potential lifespan of anything up to 550 plus years - one of the victims is on the left of this line, "cut off in its prime" at about 8 metres, with only one significant branch left.


These are on the way out long before their time and are gradually being replaced by younger trees within the row. These are about 20 - 30 years old and still overall roughly triangular in outline shape, as most young pines are. You can see their much thinner trunks in among the thicker trunks of the older trees.

These pines below have been seriously damaged by the recent deep trenching within their root protection areas to lay cables between the light standards, although the damage will only gradually become apparent in slower growth, loss of branches and increased disease attack. To be fair, the roots may not have been expected because of the intervening ditch (which the roots actually spread underneath following the ground contours faithfully) but we need to learn how to protect our trees from this sort of carelessness.



The picture below is the crown of one of the older pines, again with many missing branches removed from up its trunk. This is partly natural due to the tree's age, and the resulting expected sub-crown loss, but still, it has occurred earlier in the tree's life than it should have. The tall narrow crown forms may be partly genetic (one of the dozen plus genetic forms Scots Pines are known to have) or partly environmental (due to close planting in this avenue). The trees are likely to be European rather than Scottish in their primary genetic origin, as so many of the Scots Pine grown in England appear to be, seed probably brought over from the continent sometime in the last few hundred years to grow these trees or their parents.

Conifers were marked along this driveway on the 1890s, 1900s, 1930s and 1960s OS maps, and the pine trees still growing there are a historical marker of the local landscape going back in a continuous thread to the times when Bourne Grange (now renamed as Garrad House) was a substantial mid-Victorian private residence in its own grounds on this site.


The bark of the Scots Pine is wonderful multi-coloured layered flakes - usually with a more orange shading higher up the trunk that is more developed in this species than almost any other pine.


The trees are well furnished with this year's young female cones newly closed having received pollen in the spring of 2012, last year's female cones all sealed up and armoured with their slowly developing seeds inside them, and the two year old female cones now fully opened up (they continue to open and close according to moisture levels) having released most of the matured seeds or "pine nuts":






More on Scots Pine from the Trees for Life Project in the Scottish Highlands