The Big Fella is not so easily put down
The Reading of the Rings
Wet sawdust on top of the stump obscured the annual rings and the final sawcuts
had come from several directions. A scrub with a stiff hand-brush made things a lot
clearer (below).
Starting from outside, the red-brown bark surrounds yellow sapwood with brown
heartwood in the middle. The bark brings the leaves’ products of photosynthesis
down to build a new layer of the sapwood each year while the sapwood conducts
water upwards from the roots to the whole tree canopy. Heartwood is dead sapwood
and only contributes strength to the trunk and branches. The proportions are
different in branches (below).
It was clear from the trunk that, in the past, many branches had been trimmed off (below).
The picture (below) shows the rings marked (very faint) in 10’s.
They add up to 110, give or take a few. So the tree started life about 1910. The two healed-over branches were cut some 50 years ago, around the time that the old fire station was built and possibly connected with clearing low-growing vegetation in the vicinity of the access road.
Lastly, a piece of branch from up in the tree canopy (below) shows some really good growths ofmoss and lichens (pronounced litch-ens or like-ens). Lichens are combinations of a fungus andan algae living as one organism.
The first is of the north-facing and damper side, the second, the south-facing and drier side.
Roger Miles, Heath Tree Warden