March - Sweet Chestnut

A relatively nice day today, one of the very few this spring so far! I am going to focus a bit on winter buds and bark here, and try to get a reasonable photographic guide to supplement the written and web resources that I have current access to.

So starting off on some sweet chestnut, Castanea sativa L., here is a fairly typical bud on a lateral shoot of a tree. You can see the rounded shape, although it is just about to burst, and the relatively large heart-shaped leaf scar with its surrounding rim, on which the bud sits. The dark red lower scale off to the left isn't very clear from this angle. All the (relatively few) scales seem to be reddish to at least some extent, which fits with the descriptions. The creamy slightly raised lenticels are also quite clear on the slightly scurfy bark of last year's twigs.

Here is the apparently terminal bud from the same twig. The books insist that there are no terminal buds, just laterals with the rest of the shoot aborted, and it does look as though this could be true, with a possible terminal scar just behind the bud:

and here is another lateral, on the other side of the twig. Again the outer lower bud is partly hidden. I have no idea what the item trapped in the angle of the bud and twig is:

On the main trunks or poles the remnants of previous sideshoots remain as small squat almost triangular scars that look rather like cyclops eyes, set above more or less horizontal raised lines or ridges drawn fairly evenly across the trunk. This seems to be very characteristic of trees at this age:

Here is another shot, this time of two different occluded shoots: 

and finally one more. There is a degree of consistency, but some variation in shape of the "eyes" on the general theme: