Hey Blog! I’ve decided to write about trees this week.
Trees are really cool. The wood they are made of can be used in thousands of ways. They take carbon in from the air, helping fight climate change. They have been proved to boost mental wellbeing. Millions of stories surround millions of trees. Let’s take a look at these awesome, helpful, tiny-to-giant plants.
Last Friday, I went on a volunteer day in a privately owned wood, the one where I found the Violet Ground Beetle. There, the old Forestry Commission pines (seen in the forest pic from last week) are gradually being cut down, and native hardwoods being planted. We were chopping branches off fallen trees and clearing the area. There you could really feel how the woods are fresh, and grow. I really recommend getting out in the woods this week (that’s if the wind drops, as I don’t want people writing in with complaints!) to feel the trees and breathe the air.
Last Sunday was Watch Group. This is a wildlife group, run by the Wildlife Trusts, and last session was all about trees. The normal way to identify trees is by using their leaves, but in winter, there are no leaves, just bare twigs and buds. So to ID them, you need to know a little more. Ash has black buds and green-grey bark, so that’s easy enough. Holly is evergreen, so has spiky leaves all year round, so is even easier. Elder and Hawthorn have red buds, but the later has thorns, making for a more accurate identification. To find out more about them, get a Woodland trust winter tree ID sheet, here: https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2020/03/tree-id-kids/. Another activity was “Find the age of a tree” by measuring the distance around its trunk and dividing by a certain number. This number depends on the species of tree. The other was “Find ‘your’ tree” (put a blindfold on, get someone to take you to a tree, then feel it, the walk away, spin around a few times, and take the blindfold off. Can you find ‘your’ tree?) and the ones we didn’t do because it was so wet were Bark Rubbing and Drawing a Winter Tree. Hopefully we will be able to do these another time.
Trees don’t only help with practical things. In almost every culture different trees have different spirits, properties and meanings. Some British trees have this too, for example Holly stands for lightness, and protection, meaning it’s the obvious choice for Harry Potter’s wand. His enemy, however, has a wand of Yew, a dark and deadly wood. Birch has powers of fertility, and Aspen, the leaves of which we use as a metaphor of fear, actually represents bravery, as it (along with Hawthorn, a Faerie tree) stood at the gateway of the underworld. If you want to find out more, go to https://www.thehazeltree.co.uk and look for British trees. Using the information I found on here, I created a flow diagram to find out what tree would be best for your wand, depending on yours and the tree’s properties and personalities. My wood, according to the quiz, is Rowan, so I went up the hill and cut a branch of Rowan. I fashioned this into a wand, and it looks like this:
I hope people find the beauty and life of the woodland trees. It will mean we can save these crucial plants alive for generations to come.