I spent a chilly hour this afternoon walking Monty around the front of the college campus and took a few photos.
The Scots Pines along the main college drive are a real structural and heritage feature of the college environment, and the older ones are absolutely fantastic trees, certainly well over 50 years old, some possibly much older. Many of them are suffering from the damage and disease implicit on this site where the trees and landscape are not really heavily prioritised by the senior management (despite the best efforts of the Head Gardener) and are very unlikely to achieve their potential lifespan of anything up to 550 plus years - one of the victims is on the left of this line, "cut off in its prime" at about 8 metres, with only one significant branch left.
These are on the way out long before their time and are gradually being replaced by younger trees within the row. These are about 20 - 30 years old and still overall roughly triangular in outline shape, as most young pines are. You can see their much thinner trunks in among the thicker trunks of the older trees.
These pines below have been seriously damaged by the recent deep trenching within their root protection areas to lay cables between the light standards, although the damage will only gradually become apparent in slower growth, loss of branches and increased disease attack. To be fair, the roots may not have been expected because of the intervening ditch (which the roots actually spread underneath following the ground contours faithfully) but we need to learn how to protect our trees from this sort of carelessness.
The picture below is the crown of one of the older pines, again with many missing branches removed from up its trunk. This is partly natural due to the tree's age, and the resulting expected sub-crown loss, but still, it has occurred earlier in the tree's life than it should have. The tall narrow crown forms may be partly genetic (one of the dozen plus genetic forms Scots Pines are known to have) or partly environmental (due to close planting in this avenue). The trees are likely to be European rather than Scottish in their primary genetic origin, as so many of the Scots Pine grown in England appear to be, seed probably brought over from the continent sometime in the last few hundred years to grow these trees or their parents.
Conifers were marked along this driveway on the 1890s, 1900s, 1930s and 1960s OS maps, and the pine trees still growing there are a historical marker of the local landscape going back in a continuous thread to the times when Bourne Grange (now renamed as Garrad House) was a substantial mid-Victorian private residence in its own grounds on this site.
The bark of the Scots Pine is wonderful multi-coloured layered flakes - usually with a more orange shading higher up the trunk that is more developed in this species than almost any other pine.
The trees are well furnished with this year's young female cones newly closed having received pollen in the spring of 2012, last year's female cones all sealed up and armoured with their slowly developing seeds inside them, and the two year old female cones now fully opened up (they continue to open and close according to moisture levels) having released most of the matured seeds or "pine nuts":
More on Scots Pine from the Trees for Life Project in the Scottish Highlands
The Scots Pines along the main college drive are a real structural and heritage feature of the college environment, and the older ones are absolutely fantastic trees, certainly well over 50 years old, some possibly much older. Many of them are suffering from the damage and disease implicit on this site where the trees and landscape are not really heavily prioritised by the senior management (despite the best efforts of the Head Gardener) and are very unlikely to achieve their potential lifespan of anything up to 550 plus years - one of the victims is on the left of this line, "cut off in its prime" at about 8 metres, with only one significant branch left.
These are on the way out long before their time and are gradually being replaced by younger trees within the row. These are about 20 - 30 years old and still overall roughly triangular in outline shape, as most young pines are. You can see their much thinner trunks in among the thicker trunks of the older trees.
These pines below have been seriously damaged by the recent deep trenching within their root protection areas to lay cables between the light standards, although the damage will only gradually become apparent in slower growth, loss of branches and increased disease attack. To be fair, the roots may not have been expected because of the intervening ditch (which the roots actually spread underneath following the ground contours faithfully) but we need to learn how to protect our trees from this sort of carelessness.
The picture below is the crown of one of the older pines, again with many missing branches removed from up its trunk. This is partly natural due to the tree's age, and the resulting expected sub-crown loss, but still, it has occurred earlier in the tree's life than it should have. The tall narrow crown forms may be partly genetic (one of the dozen plus genetic forms Scots Pines are known to have) or partly environmental (due to close planting in this avenue). The trees are likely to be European rather than Scottish in their primary genetic origin, as so many of the Scots Pine grown in England appear to be, seed probably brought over from the continent sometime in the last few hundred years to grow these trees or their parents.
Conifers were marked along this driveway on the 1890s, 1900s, 1930s and 1960s OS maps, and the pine trees still growing there are a historical marker of the local landscape going back in a continuous thread to the times when Bourne Grange (now renamed as Garrad House) was a substantial mid-Victorian private residence in its own grounds on this site.
The bark of the Scots Pine is wonderful multi-coloured layered flakes - usually with a more orange shading higher up the trunk that is more developed in this species than almost any other pine.
The trees are well furnished with this year's young female cones newly closed having received pollen in the spring of 2012, last year's female cones all sealed up and armoured with their slowly developing seeds inside them, and the two year old female cones now fully opened up (they continue to open and close according to moisture levels) having released most of the matured seeds or "pine nuts":
More on Scots Pine from the Trees for Life Project in the Scottish Highlands
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