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Sometimes, to notice is enough

Writer's picture: CroneCrone

After doing some training with Leanne, I went off for a walk at Cottesbrooke - which involved some interesting sightings and some tree climbing - for subsequent posts - and an observation.


There's a line of oaks where some are the mid-green of the top one in the above photo, most probably; some are dark green like the lower one and one tree is paler and sparsely leafed. The mid-green have mid-sized leaves, the dark green have large leaves and the sparse ones leaves are small but it has a lot of large acorns. I wondered if that tree was OK in spring as it always looked bare in comparison with the other trees. Back then, I also noticed that some trees looked darker.


Now, I am pretty sure these are all the same species, pedunculate oak rather than sessile, though they may be hybrids. They are all a similar age - maybe 250-300 years old. They are all in the same hedgerow. What I conclude from this is that different genes within the one species lead to different looking trees with differing resilience.


You may say, No shit, Sherlock.


I agree. It's obvious. Yet when we look at trees, as lay-people, we tend to categorise them thus, either as "oak' generally or maybe as "pedunculate oak", to go to the species. What I am insisting here is an acknowledgement of individuality.


Often I have celebrated on here the varieties of forms oaks take - how their branches grow, the shape of the trunk. But that is far from the limit: there's colour and leaf size too. And health and resilience, which might be largely genetic.


So, differences in genes can be added to the influence of the environment - and this is huge as it includes not just light and shade, moisture and dryness, prevailing wind and so on but also nibbling by herbivores, pruning by humans, insect attacks, whether a lot of animals defecate near the roots, quantum effects within cells that may impact gene expression and so on and so forth. Just think how many events impact whether a fungal spore land here or there!


What this adds up to is this: infinite variability. Even in infinite worlds with infinite numbers of trees, they would not be the same - even given the same genes and environment (because of the quantum impacts).


Think around that. An infinity in just one species. And that does not, of course, include the potential varieties of personality and temperament we might see (more easily?) in animals.


I posted the line of trees to a Woodland Trust forum and one knowledgeable respondent said, basically: they are probably all pedunculate or hybrid, check the length of the acorn stems, and by the way colour is irrelevant for identification at this time of year.


That misses the point I was trying to make entirely: I don't want to categorise and label them, I want to celebrate them.

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