Following on from our wanderings around Croft’s walled garden we made for the upward sloping land where vintage trees grow. The first photo shows an old oak with conifers in the background.
As you can see it was a beautiful sunny, blue sky day ideal for highlighting the textures of their bark and looking up through the bare skeletal filigree patterns of their bare branches.
The first few trees we looked at were close to the cafe, one has virtually no branches or boughs left. The weather initially was overcast with clouds moving rapidly but soon gave way to a luscious blue.
From the five barred gate at the bottom of the hillside we could survey all of the trees and chose the one shown below to look at first. Closer too and we could see and touch the roughly fissured patterns of the bark.
We stayed quite a while appreciating its individual quality. Like humans each tree has its own personality. We then looked around to decide which tree to make our way to next. We chose one with such a different character, taller, paler in colour and a much simpler pattern of branches. It was so good at catching the light.
We enjoyed studying the simple structure of its branches with a complete lack of gentle thin twigs. This meant that it cast a very sparse shadow across the grass. Bark had disappeared completely from every branch stripped by all types of boring insects, insect seeking birds. Branches which had fallen to the ground were found by a new set of creatures who took over especially beetles and fungi.
A change of direction found us on course for our next carefully selected tree to study, a real ancient battered oak, strangely without its growing tip so was very short and broad. It had a massive girth indicating just how much of its upper limbs it had lost perhaps to strong wind or lightning.
With this oak we looked downwards and spotted dried up leaves from last autumn and also upwards through the few living boughs and branches, which is where the leaves would have dropped from.
But what is extra special about this old character is that it it lets you look inside as well and upwards from inside too. Jude couldn’t wait, dropping her bag onto grass she was soon inside looking around.
Leaving the old hollow oak behind we admired the silhouette of a younger oak looking so healthy, with a beautiful sky to emphasise its shape. We were on our way to study a fallen oak which although dead itself was alive with living creatures, fungi, lichen and mosses. Beetles and their larvae love dead wood. Adults lay their eggs in the soft wood and once hatched the larvae feed on the rotten wood. The National Trust have a policy now where felled trees are left in situ to become homes to all sorts of life.
We looked closely at the textures and colours of the dead, rotting wood.
Lichen and mosses grow happily on the old tree trunk, taking advantage of any place that moisture and organic matter settles.
We discovered another fallen tree and a seat carved from yet another as we returned to the carpark.
greenbenchramblings 