Dene Park Beech Trees

Following up on the Beech story from yesterday, there are several compartments of Beech planted up at Dene Park that must be about 40 - 50 years old, so I was able to compare these with the mixed age woodland at Bitchett Common.

Looking at the ID features first, the trees in both locations are pretty much the same. One of the things to note about the Beech leaves in both locations are the silky hairs along the veins and particularly in the vein axils on the underside of the leaves:

On the other hand, there was one difference, the trees along the track at Dene Park do have much better beech mast than the trees at Bitchett Common, and this is ripening up fast:

The invertebrate population looked quite similar, with the lepidopteran Phyllonorycter maestingella leaf mines and the gall midge Hartigiola annulipes galls easy to find, as yesterday.

The other species that was very common was the upper leaf rolling gall mite (Eriophyid mite) Aceria stenaspis, which is not easy to notice unless you know what you are looking for and are specifically searching from it. However once you get your eye in, its quite easy to see. The edge is rolled and may be crimped or thickened, and is usually a different green or yellow colour in comparison to the rest of the leaf surface. I didn't see any yesterday but I wasn't looking for it so it may well have been as widespread at Bitchett as it was today at Dene Park.

In addition I was able to find patches of an erineum (felting) on the underside of some leaves caused by another Eriophyid mite, said to be Aceria fagineum. This may very well have been on the underside of the leaves at Bitchett Common, but I didn't really look at the undersides yesterday. Distribution today was quite patchy, but there was definitely a concentration on one tree in compartment one.

Of course it is also important to be aware of galls that are not found, and there are still several fly serpentine mines and the gall midge Mikiola fagi to be discovered. This last is quite beautiful, but I have never seen it.

Trees

Ranscombe Farm

What a fantastic place this reserve is - where Meadow Clary has survived ever since it was first named here 250 years ago. Took a slow walk around the really colourful field by the railway line and managed to get some reasonable photos.

Warwick services

Its amazing what a bit of tree and shrub planting can do. At Warwick services London-bound there is a nice mixed area of closely planted trees, shrubs and grass at the far end of the car-park, which is primarily used by dog-walkers (including myself). As long as you ignore the rubbish strewn absolutely everywhere and the roar from the motorway carriageway a few dozen yards away, its very pleasant on a nice warm summers day - although I remember it as very wet underfoot over winter.

Today while walking Monty on the lead (he knew there were rabbits there and I didn't want him running off) I found many ringlets fluttering near the shrubby trees and the associated long grass margins (no meadow browns that I could see for sure), several gatekeepers near each other on the sloe bushes in a sheltered clearing and a lovely marbled white butterfly wandering the area as a whole, with its aposematic colouring backed by the repellent chemicals supposedly found in the fungi growing on the grassy food-plants originally consumed by the larvae!

There were also the normal soldier beetles, marmalade hover-flies and many small moths - what a shame I didn't have my camera!

Silver maple

One of the best trees in the village.

White is the new black

At last, a chance to find a specimen from another Populus group other than the black poplars I've been trying to get to grips with over the last few days. An early evening visit to Tonbridge Sports ground at Swanmead to give Monty his walk, turned up a line of five black poplars of a kind I don't think I've seen before, but also a couple of trees of the "Abele", or white poplar, Populus alba L., in amongst a sort of collection of less usual trees/shrubs on raised rougher ground in the middle of the various pitches. These are the first ones I've seen (consciously) for quite a few years, indicating the little notice I've taken of trees in the past!

Its a beautiful tree, quite rounded in its canopy outline but with whitish trunks above the roughened and darkened lower bole, the white areas of the trunks fairly well peppered with lines of black diamonds surrounding the vertical lenticels, and with furry white hairs completely covering the shoots, buds and undersurface of the leaves of the current growth, with some white remnants of the fur on the top surfaces of the leaves as well. The underside of the new leaves is SO soft - like Monty's ears, only possibly even softer!!! The whole impression is completely un-black poplar like, and quite a surprise. The bilateral flattening of petioles is only clear on previous year's leaves, and can't be said to be at all obvious on the soft lax petioles of what I think are this year's leaves, if the growth rings can be relied upon. The tree is said by Mitchell to lean, and to have its greatest canopy width nearest the top, but neither of these features was clear in these specimens. I did see suckers, regarded as commonly formed, particularly commonly on sandy soils (Mitchell).

On this tree the leaf blades appear to be about 5 cm long and wide, rounded, with almost aspen-like teeth on the leaves well under the main canopy, the ones that I can easily reach, or sometimes more-or-less five-lobed. Small arrow-head stipules, buds not well developed yet,  in August. If Mitchell is right about the dimensions, the small size of the leaves helps to confirm this tree as P. alba, as opposed to P. x canescens, the hybrid with P. tremula, the aspen.



The white poplar was introduced into England from Central and Southern Europe or Asia at an early but unknown date. The trees should have a yellow autumn colour (there is a cv. Richardii, which is generally yellow throughout year). I'll plan to return in autumn to see this colour, and again in spring to examine the catkins and find out whether this is a male or female tree - male trees are very rare according to BSBI.

The tree suckers well in some situations in Britain and Europe, and this is a potential nuisance in gardens, but an advantage in coastal areas (it is salt resistant) where it is sometimes used to help stabilise shifting dunes. The tree has also been introduced into America since 1748, where it is said to be a bit of an invasive problem due to its suckers and it has actually been banned in Connecticut. Luckily it does not seed heavily there (there are few males) and this limits its overall invasive potential.

Its said to be a tree that tends to lean, and this can be seen in these rather less beautiful specimens a little bit further over in the sports ground, which show rather less white, and seem to have grown very little this year. I still think they are P. alba, and not P. x canescens.

There is also a pyrimidal form (pyrimidalis according to Mitchell, syn Bolleana), known as Bolle's poplar syn pyrimidalis according to the Collins guide, which is a selection from wild trees in Turkmenistan, and found in some collections.

The Abele tree is dedicated to Hercules in memory of his victory over the monster Cacus (the site of the conflict was the Aventine hill, one of the 7 hills where Rome was built, said to be covered with white poplars at the time) and garlands of white poplar were traditionally used as victory wreaths.

These are the lenticals forming on a young shoot, soon to be surrounded by black diamonds of raised bark on older trunks. Visible from the ground as lines or necklaces of black diamond shapes on the light grey bark high in the tree above the black roughened boles, they are distinctive features of the tree.

Trembling aspen

As far as I know there is only one group of aspens (Populus tremula L.) in the parish - along the Green Lane Nature Trail that we and the local schoolchildren planted up about 15 years ago on College ground for the National Westminster Countryside Initiative!

The long bilaterally flattened petioles wave about in the breeze, encouraging the leaves to flop from side to side and so give the "trembling" look (and rustling sound) of the foliage characteristic of this and some other species and cultivars of poplar (or as the Americans say, cottonwoods). In light or no winds the leaves hold rigidly still, in complete and rather spooky contrast.

The patch we have seems to be suckering densely about the base of a few older trees, which we may have planted with BTCV encouragement all those years ago.

The leaves are all a good mid-green at present but should eventually be changing to their beautiful golden autumn colours, and showing well by October. The petioles and venation is a characteristic poplar yellow-green, but one point to notice is the maturity of the twigs. Already, by mid-August, the twig bark of this year's growth has hardened to a good solid-looking olive brown, actually darker than the more yellowy previous year's growth, particularly on the underside of the shoot. This is a bit of a conundrum, as how could twig bark get lighter over time? The buds are also already apparently well-formed, particularly the terminal ones, which already look as if they have entered a resting phase, although they are still a bit small (c. 6 mm. on the tip). In fact our aspen already looks ready for winter. Perhaps this possible early preparation for winter is one reason that aspen is so common in Scotland and can even grow well above the Artic Circle in Norway, where very few other decidous flowering trees occur - a very tough customer indeed.

Axillary buds laterally compressed and pointed, 3-4 mm long, greenish with brown tips, terminal bud more chunky, although still only 6 mm long, greenish and brown over scales.

Our leaves don't seem to resemble sucker leaves at all, as described by BSBI, but appear completely characteristic of the standard trees. Are our "suckers" really seedlings I wonder? Leaf blade up to 8 cm long by 7 cm wide, petiole a matching 8 cm long, larger than as in Mitchell, but OK by BSBI. 6 - 12 pairs of teeth on the rounded slightly crinkled leaf margins. Leaf tips generally drawn into somewhat acuminate points, so that the toothed margin and pointed leaf tip contrast unusually with the overall rounded leaf outline. Beautiful trees!

They aren't so common in the Southeast of England, although there is a well-known tree on the boggy soil of Hothfield Heaths near Ashford in SE Kent. A BTCV connection perhaps?