Friends of Bernards Heath

The Big Fella is not so easily put down

The reading of the rings

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).

The bark started to heal over the stumps, but before this was complete, the wood had rotted. Bark can only lay down new wood on a sound surface. Poplar is not rated as a ‘durable’ wood, meaning that dead wood does not resist decay well.

Going back to the second picture, on the left is a branch stump which successfully healed over. The blackened cut surface was partially exposed by a felling cut. In contrast, on the right is a pocket of rot which started when a branch was cut off. It eventually closed over, but never quite healed properly, as can be seen (below). A slight ‘witness’ occurs to this day in the bark surface, although, without seeing the cut stump, it would not be apparent.

Oh, you want to know how old the tree was? 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 of moss and lichens (pronounced litch-ens or like-ens). Lichens are combinations of a fungus and an algae living as one organism.

On the left is of the north-facing and damper side and on the right, the south-facing and drier side.

Roger Miles, Heath Tree Warden

Not necessarily ‘The bigger they come, the harder they fall’

Until a few days ago, just to the left of and in front of the old fire station were two trees,
a sycamore and a very large poplar. Probably a hybrid black poplar, to be more precise
(to left in picture above, leaves shown below).

Continue reading “Felling the Big Fella Part I”

This young Beech tree was felled just off Harpenden Road on or around 29th July. We have been planting trees on the Heath over the winter, so it is disheartening when this happens. Do you know anything about it? – if so, contact FoBH chairman by clicking FoBH Mail in the right-hand column.

On the left above the tree as it was and on the right the location. The tree was cleanly sawn off with a handsaw and left as shown.

Images from Google Street View dated April 2019 and Google maps.

This large ash tree recently came down partially blocking this path to the WW2 water tank, which can just be seen in the background.  The tree broke off near the top of the roots, see inset image. Fortunately, it did not fall towards the tank, which is still threatened by a large sycamore only inches away.  The Council has agreed to deal with the ash tree.

Continue reading “Ash Trees feel the strain”