Pink hawthorn

Every year, sometime in May, somewhere in the reserve, there is pink hawthorn blossom; not uniformly pink and not always in the same hedge as was pink last year but definitely pink in places. It’s very pretty but we don’t know what causes it.

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Tree planting

We have been making what might seem to our followers like a great fuss about the planting of just a very few disease resistant elm trees. Here are parts of a post from March 2020, which explain what disease our precious saplings are resistant to, and why we are so eager to get them established in the hedge between Cornfield and Sleepers.

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Disease resistant elms

Progress report

by Ian Bushell

On April 10th we checked the fifteen Dutch Elm Disease Resistant trees, donated by Peter Shallcross and Frank Crosier, that we had planted in April 2021.

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Tree felling

by Ian Bushell

Our Tree Officer, Rich Murphy, has been running chainsaw monitoring sessions with Clive, Phil and myself to check our competence to fell trees in the reserve. The reserve belongs to the county and they are the people who pay to insure us.

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Fly agaric again

This is fly agaric, a mycorrhizal fungus, Amanita muscaria, which is found in the reserve every year despite our lack of its preferred partners: birch and pine trees. In classic pictures of this red and white fungus, those that don’t have an elf sitting on top are usually growing picturesquely in the moss under a birch tree.

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Why do the leaves change colour?

There are three kinds of pigment in a usually green leaf: carotenes which are yellow, red and pink anthocyanins, and chlorophyll, which is the green that masks the other colours until autumn.

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Acorns

Oak trees produce thousands of acorns every year. Somebody has worked out that an oak tree can produce ten million acorns over its lifetime. In a good year, they carpet the ground under the tree and crunch underfoot.

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“Shed not a clout till may be out…”

It’s not, as many believe, an instruction to keep your coat on until June; it’s telling you to take your cardigan off as soon as the may is in blossom, which has been known to happen as early as April.

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Hazel

Always among the year’s first flowers in the reserve are the hazel catkins in the copse near the picnic place. They are a familiar and friendly sign that spring is on its way.

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What happened to Oak 5552?

Sometimes, healthy and mature trees shed large branches during the summer for no apparent reason. This is what is known as Summer Branch Drop Syndrome and it is what happened to Oak 5552 in August of this year.

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