Ripe cherries

 Wild cherries Prunus avium have been ripening this week in Weardale. I've tasted quite a lot of wild cherries over the years and most are sour or bitter-tasting, but occasionally I come across a tree with unusually juicy, deep red fruits that make excellent cherry sauce for pouring over ice cream. It looks like a bird has already had a peck at one in the first picture, below. Once they begin to ripen the birds take them very quickly. 

Rooks often eat those that fall under the tree but only hawfinches have beaks that are strong enough to split open the stones. Otherwise the seeds pass unharmed through their gut and are dispersed to become new seedling trees, unless field mice find them. 

When I demolished our old garden shed a few years ago I found a wood mouse's stash of scores of cherry stones from the tree that used to grow in our garden hedge, each with a neat hole nibbled in it, where the rodent had extracted the kernel.

Blossom

From March until July, this has been the best for native tree blossom that I can recall in our part of the North Pennines. It started with sloe and is now coming to an end with elder. Here they are, in chronological sequence

Blackthorn aka Sloe

Wild cherry aka gean

Hawthorn

Bird cherry

Rowan aka mountain ash

Elder

A Brief (and very dubious) History of Chewing Gum

I was passing some wild cherry trees in Weardale this afternoon and noticed this ball of solidified gum exuded from a damaged branch of one of them. Prunus species tend to do this if they're wounded – plum and cherry trees in particular are prone to exude gum if they’re wounded. 

I vaguely remembered that this gum is supposed to be edible and when I got home checked it out in some early natural history books. Curiously the notion of its edibility seems to be based on the same original account,repeated more or less verbatim in books from the 18^th., 19^th., and 20^th. Century (plagiarism has always been rife in natural history writing). It goes as follows:

‘Hasselquist relates that more than a hundred men, during a siege, were kept alive for near two months without any other sustenance than a little of this gum taken into the mouth sometimes, and suffered gradually to dissolve’.

That comes from William Withering’s 1776 treatise called A Botanical Arrangement of all the Vegetables Naturally growing in Great Britain..., which was the oldest source I could lay my hands on.

So who was the mysterious Hasselquist, who seems to be the original source of this persistently plagiarised information? It turns out that Fredrik Hasselquist (1722-1752), a Swede, was a contemporary of Linnaeus who travelled extensively in the Middle East during his all-to-short life.

I couldn’t find the original source of Withering’s quote on the web but did find another, even more improbable, account by Hasselquist of the miraculous nutritional qualities of chewing gum.

It comes fronm his book entitled Voyages and Travels in the Levant in the years 1749, 50, 51, 52, containing observations in natural history, physick, agriculture and commerce, particularly on the Holy Land, and the natural history of the Scriptures. Remarkably, its available to read on the web, here, courtesy of Google books.

In this passage he’s referring to gum Arabic rather than Prunus gum, but for gum chewers everywhere it's reassurance that, if you are caught in a difficult situation, salvation may come through mastication.

‘The Abyssinians make a journey to Cairo every year, to sell the products of their country......They must travel over terrible deserts ... the necessities of life may chance to fail them when the journey lasts too long. This happened to the Abyssinian caravan in the year 1750, when provisions being consumed, when they had still two months to travel... they were obliged to search for something amongst their merchandise, wherewith they might support life in this extremity, and found nothing more proper that gum Arabic. This served to support above 1000 persons for two months ... the caravan arrived safe in Cairo, without any great loss of people either by hunger or diseases’. 

Improbable maybe, but I've seen more outrageous claims made in the popular press about purported benefits of health foods.....

Meawhile, back to cherry trees - and you can read about their beautifully fragrant wood at this excellent new blog.

An Autumn Walk along the River Tees

The long, narrow gorge spanned by Egglestone's Abbey Bridge bridge provides one the most picturesque viewing points on the River Tees in autumn

This is the view from the bridge looking upstream - Egglestone Abbey is just  above the trees in the middle distance (double-click) and is ...

...... visible from the bridge now that the leaves are falling.

The view downstream - there are footpaths on both sides of the river and you can follow it down to its confluence with the River Greta, at the Meeting of the Waters.

The river squeezes through narrow gaps and tumbles over boulders ...

.... and you can hear it through the trees all the way along the path, even when it isn't in spate.

The high humidity in the gorge makes this a fine habitat for mosses and ferns like this polypody growing as an epiphyte on a tree branch over the river.

Yellowing horse chestnut leaves provide a sunbathing spot for flies whose days are numbered, now that frosts are on their way.

Nectar-rich ivy flowers provide a last-minute refuelling station for drone flies.

Shades of yellow - hazel, oak and beech autumn colours.

Some of the large beeches have been attacked by honey fungus - always fatal, but it can take decades to kill the tree.

A nuthatch, dangling down to pick beech nuts out of beech mast - it seems to be a 'mast year', with a very heavy crop.

Ripe holly berries are a reminder that there are only 50 shopping days until Christmas.

Downstream there are some wild cherries with a fiery display of autumn colours..

... and a fine crop of ripe yew berries.

A passing shower leaves a rainbow, which is wasted on those two sheep that are watching - they only have dichromatic vision and can't distinguish red from green.

Looking back upstream - on what Kenneth Grahame in the Wind in the Willows called a 'golden afternoon'...

Room to Grow

Unless they're deliberately cultivated in an arboretum, most trees never get the chance to spread their limbs and assume their natural shape throughout their life - all too often they're confined to hedges and hacked about during hedge trimming or struggle to compete for light and space in a woodland. But this ancient wild cherry has been given room to grow. For some unknown reason it was planted (or maybe accidentally sown by a bird) in the centre of a field near Harperley in County Durham. Here it is in in magnificnet isolation, in the snow-covered landscape last winter........

........ and here it is today, photographed from exactly the same spot, covered in blossom and with a few sheep enjoying its shade on an unusually hot April day.

A Tree-Spotter's Guide to Flowers: 3

Sloe (blackthorn) blossom is produced before any leaves appear, often in such profusion that whole hedgerows can look as though they're covered in snow.

Wild cherry (gean) blossom - clusters of large flowers set against expanding foliage that has a bronze tint when it's young.

Male ash flowers. Ash trees flower long before their leaves expand - this is usually the last tree species to come into leaf, in May. There are three basic kinds of ash tree. All-male trees like this produce dense clusters of crimson pollen-producing anthers when their flower buds burst. All-male trees never produce ash 'keys' in autumn.

 Female trees produce clusters of flowers with bright red stigmas and styles - the style will later develop into the wing of the ash 'key'. Female trees produce heavy crops of  'keys' in autumn.






















Close-up of female ash flowers. There are also hermaphrodite trees, whose flowers look similar to these female flowers but have a pair of pollen-producing anthers attached on either side of those slender green stalks. They too produce heavy crops of 'keys' in autumn.

Just to complicate matters even further, some trees produce any two of the above three flower types on the same tree i.e. male + female; male + hermaphrodite; female + hermaphrodite.

For more information on trees click here

A Tree-Spotter's Guide to Bark: Part 2

The grey-brown bark of alder Alnus glutinosa isn't particular distinctive - unlike the wood within. Freshly-felled alder wood turns a startling shade of red, although this quickly oxidises to a pinkish-brown. Understandably, the blood-like shade of the cut timber gave rise to many superstitions but didn't stop the coppicing of the tree for the production of high quality charcoal for gunpowder. Alder wood lasts exceptionally well if it's kept permanently wet or submerged - not surprising really, considering the tree's propensity for growing on riverbanks that frequently flood - and it was sometimes used for piles in bridge construction and also for the soles of clogs.

Wild cherry or gean Prunus avium bark is easily recognised by the long horizontal scars (lenticels) that run across the trunk. These are areas of porous bark that allow gas exchange for the living tissues below that generate new wood each year. Cherry bark also has a tendency to peel away in narrow strips around the circumference of the tree.

From a distance silver birch Betula pendula bark is dazzling white when it catches the sunlight, but a closer look reveals subtle shades of pink, orange and brown showing through from the bark tissues just below the surface. At this stage in the tree's life the birch bark peels away, sometimes in large sheets, as the diameter of the trunk expands (and so is ideal for birch-bark canoes) but as the tree ages....

-- the bark splits vertically, separating the white bark into flakey patches between deep fissures.

For more information on tree identification click here