March - Cricket-bat Willow

March - Hornbeam

The buds of the Hornbeam, Carpinus betulae, L., are just breaking now. Here is a fairly straight bud lying next to the stem, showing the typical red tips and yellowy-greener bases of the well ordered bud scales on the long-ovoid bud just next to the stem. 

The lenticels, if that is what the white spots are, seem to lie absolutely flat on the surface of the stem, which in this case at least are a lovely sunburned maroony red. The sparse longer hairs are scattered occasionally about on the twig: 

Here is another bud, slightly less advanced. Again the bud seems very straight. In the trees at the front of the college, the buds seem to sweep in forming a distinct curve, bringing the bud curving across the top of, or underneath the twig.

This next picture is of a different tree, which I think must also be a Hornbeam, if it isn't a Beech, but with a stem more out in the open of the ride. The bud seems to be hairier, the twig horizontal and much longer and thinner, and the leaf scar is also much smaller. This might tie in with the increased exposure of the buds, but being a long lateral trying to get into the light.

Next is a young Hornbeam stem, showing the smooth but sinewy bark. In many trees the sinews are very obvious, and the tree looks as though it has knotted tissues under the bark - described in the Collins Tree Guide as "heavily muscled" fluting. I think the apparent spirals at this stage are just a bit coincidental.

Here is another stem, quite close by, showing some roughening of the bark:

In older trees the bark may become much rougher, fissured into crusty longitudinal plates, but this takes some time.

March - Hazel

Here are fairly typical male Hazel catkins (lambs tails) on a bush by the roadside on the South side of the River Medway just over the Hartlake bridge. Some bushes have virtually finished flowering now,  but this one still has catkins with the tiny flowers at their peak. 

Here is a Hazel bud, Corylus avellana, of fairly typical shape. Note that the later bud scales are fringed with hairs:

The buds are sometimes slightly pointed but still characteristically hazel, including the slightly fringed scales to the bud.

This bud below is infected with Phytoptus avellanae, the Hazel Big Bud Mite, an Eriophyid mite. The highlights in this picture have been darkened a trifle. On the twig I think you can see the two types of hair found on Hazel shoots and petioles, the bases remaining of the silky silvery hairs, together with the stiffer more bristly, maybe glandular, hairs. The bud still has the silky fringes to the scales characteristic of Hazel. According to Wikipedia, two forms of P. avellanae exist, a gall causer and a vagrant form that has a more complex life-cycle and does not form galls. Umm.

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:

Cracks in horizontal branches - hazard beams?

An absolutely fascinating sight on a long near-horizontal branch on a beech tree.





Commonly found in Beech and Oak, according to Arbtalk. "This fault tends to happen to phototropic limbs (extending rapidly toward light) 90% of the time they are growing on the North side if in open ground as the limb tries to reach away from the main body of the crown to reach out from canopy shading.

it is very common, and in most cases removal of the branch is not needed, simply reduction by one third the length is usually enough to manage the hazard. This is a good way of maintaining the habitat that is the hazard beam. In time they stabilise and occlude, how many limbs have you ever cut only to see they have a large crack at their centres? Removal makes a large wound at the stem junction, a higher future risk than a stabilised hazard beam fracture.

Dog legs where a leading tip has died and a sub order shoot takes over as in this case are more prone to the fault, and worth looking out for when managing trees, especialy in parkland or open grown situations.

Also worth noting that Matthecks slenderness ratio can be applied to limb assesment as well as stem calculations."

South East Bat Conference

Bat Conference in Chatham

A fantastic bat conference today, full of information relevant to trees and tree wardening. One of the very interesting presentations was from the Kent Bat Group including their new project on bat boxes in woodland, focussed on the Blean woodlands in East Kent.  This has developed out of work with the North Bucks Bat Group, who have researched ideas on the siting, types, etc. of bat boxes, and who have partnered KBG in this new work. It is clear that boxes on trees don't have to be in the sunniest spots - this may suit some species such as pipistrelles perhaps, but for some woodland specialists such as Bechstein's and Brown Long-eared Bats, deep shade is an excellent spot to place a box in woodland! Even where there are large numbers of boxes in a wood, bat populations may still spend about 80% of their nights roosting in the trees rather than the boxes - showing how important older trees suitable for bat roosts are!

It is early days but the first use of a box by a bat in Kent has already been recorded. This is a photo from the Bedfordshire Bat Group blog section of their October Bat Box checking. Sometimes the boxes are higher in the trees, which certainly wouldn't suit me! However I would love to put some bat boxes up in Hadlow - if only I could afford the Schwegler boxes which last long enough to be worthwhile, and if I could get a roost visitor license to allow me to check the boxes!

Bats must use many of the trees in and around Hadlow as roosts, and in consequence there should be controls on tree surgery to likely trees - there doesn't seem to be much evidence for these controls being in place over tree work in many areas - but nuff said I think.


A tree forms an essential part of an often complex ecosystem that provides a variety of habitats for
a range of different wildlife species, including bats. Of the seventeen bat species breeding in the UK, fourteen are known to roost in trees. Some bat species rely exclusively on trees for roost sites, whilst others use them for part of the year. All seventeen species forage in woodland and along woodland edges.

Any tree can be used as a bat roost, as long as it provides shelter, e.g. in the form of splits, cracks,
holes and cavities in the trunk and branches, loose bark and ivy cover (Figure 1). Roosts can be at
any height in the tree, although upper trunk and branches are probably more common.

September - Hazel

Interesting shot of a hazel bud in the axil of a leaf - and intriguing to see the colours of the minute hairs on the stem and the petiole:

This shows the coarse hairs you do get on hazel shoots, and apparently petioles: