Tree shapes and oddities
Walking around the village in winter and seeing the deciduous trees bare of leaves and silhouetted against the sky, highlights some of the interesting tree shapes and oddities, making them appear more prominent.
There are several lime trees Tilia x europaea with excess growth, which looks like there’s a bush growing in the middle of the tree, with a flat bottom at just about maximum nibble height for deer and cows.
When you start looking, you see this a lot, mostly on limes but also on ash Fraxinus excelsior, especially since ash dieback disease (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus formerly known as Chalara fraxinea) entered the country in 2012 and subsequently found its feet.
This epicormic growth happens when trees of certain species put out extra growth from formerly dormant adventitious buds on their trunk or branches when under stress. Often because they have been pollarded (pruning to the top of the tree which promotes growth), but also because of other environmental damage such as drought or through having their bark chewed. This growth is often called water shoots and gardeners often know these from pruning their apple and pear trees.
Another feature that becomes more obvious when the landscape is less lush, are the lumps and bumps on the trunks of trees. These burrs, often found on oak Quercus robur trees, but also on other trees such as ash, beech Fagus sylvatica and walnut Juglans regia, are similar to the above stress shoots but the lumpy outgrowth is caused by the trees inner grain having developed in a deformed manner and enveloped small knots formed from dormant buds.
These burrs are highly valued in furniture making and for use in turning.
Lastly, from me anyway, are the ‘witches brooms’ that can be seen occasionally in a birch Betula pendula tree. From a distance they look like birds nests, but they are actually an infection of the tree’s buds or shoots associated with the parasitic fungus Taphrina betulina and causing localised growth, but they are not fully understood, much like witches, and could also be caused by other fungi, insects or viruses.
On that cheery note I’ll leave you!
