Two nice oaks

Still walking at the Firs.... well, bot in real life, but as far as the pictures are concerned.

It was with these trees that I realised that tree trunks are not really brown, and also where I saw ants busily walking up and down the trunk to collect something - I presume honeydew from aphids - from high up in the canopy.

One of them has dropped a large spreading branch.

At the foot of one, this large fungal fruiting body, like a papier mache rose with the diameter of a large dinner plate. I think it's a hen in the woods.

Now, in that Rix book I came across something that made me feel rather clever. i have suspected that Acute Oak Decline is more about what oaks are MISSING than about anything extra in the environment. I thought that fertilizers increasing the nitrogen in the soil might impact the soil biota and I wondered about lost mycorhizal relationships. Well, she says that oaks used to have three concentric rings of fungal partners and that impacted trees have at least the outer and often the two outer rings missing due, indeed, to agricultural chemicals.

Crone is not a fool.