A few months ago I blended up a bit of dragonfruit pulp and mixed it with topsoil. I have mostly been ignoring the seedlings in the window but I potted up a few to raise outdoors this summer. The seedlings are awfully cute.
I saw this tree beside a local apartment building today: it’s probably been planted by the municipality or the tenant’s association, and has perhaps not been tended so carefully since then.
I am guessing the tree is meant to display as a double-flowering pink ornamental cherry, but the single white blossoms are likely from the rootstock, which has formed a shoot parallel to the grafted scion shoot, and grown more vigorously.
The result is a tree with two distinct genetic expressions: the upright form and white blossoms of the rootstock tower over the drooping form and pink blossoms of the scion.
In the long term, without pruning out the more vigorous rootstock trunks, the white-flowering parts of the tree will shade or crowd out the pink-flowering grafted parts, affecting them to make up an increasingly small percentage of the tree’s bulk.
Many ornamental grafted trees are selected for their special flowering characteristics (in this case, large, double, pink blossoms), and not for their vigour. They are grafted to a rootstock that does well in the immediate climate, and has characteristics like disease-resistance. Many rootstocks produce ‘suckers’ (basal shoots), which are normally controlled through pruning.
I love multi-grafted trees, however, so I find this arrangement rather charming. It does, however, provide an illustration of why pruning grafted trees – especially between cultivars that have varying shapes, colours, and vigour – is important.
Take a moment and appreciate the amount of artificial selection that made these slightly bitter wild fruits – pictured above, no bigger than a marble – into the sweet dark fruits in the supermarket most of us know as cherries.
Have you ever seen something so disgustingly simple, and so brilliant at the same time?
Instead of tapping the main trunk of these birch trees, someone has simply sawed off a limb and attached a bag to the end for the sap to drip in to.
It’s a good bit less complicated than the hose and water bottle setup I spied in the forest last year, and it’s much less risky for the tree to have this done on a limb, as opposed to the main trunk.
Part of me is squinting all “wtf”, probably cause I’m used to the old metal bucket style from our silver maples. This is definitely thinking outside the box, or bucket, as it were.
Caused by the fungus Taphrina pruni, this disease infects plums, sloe, and damsons (as well as other closely-related Prunus), making some of the fruits grow in an oblong shape, and fail to develop a stone. Vascular tissues of the plant are also deformed by the fungal mycelium, forming witch’s brooms.
The local Mirabelles seem to be infected, although as you can see by the photo above, they still produce healthy fruits alongside the deformed ones. The fungus won’t kill the tree, but will certainly reduce the harvest.
The best solution is pruning out infected growth, and burning it to prevent the spread of more airborne spores.
I wrote an article about periodical cicadas for @modfarm earlier this year, but I had never actually seen one of these beasties up close until I landed in Montréal last week.
For over a decade, European Mistletoe (Viscum album) has been intentionally planted on several of the crabapple trees at the farm. It looks absolutely gorgeous in the winter.
This hemiparasitic plant is normally spread by birds (zoochory). Some mistletoe-feeders have specialised digestive tracks that allow them to break down the viscin (adhesive cellulosic strands and mucopolysaccharides contained in the sticky fruit pulp), and they pass the undigested seeds onto a branch, gluing them in place with guano. Other birds will find the drupe too sticky, and will wipe their beaks on the branch, depositing the seed and viscin (which hardens rapidly upon exposure to air) on the host plant.
After the seed germinates, it forms a root-like organs called haustoria. These penetrate the tissues of the host plant: stealing water, nutrients, and sugars, and the hemiparasite begins to dramatically reduce independent photosynthetic activity.
An aggressive mistletoe infestation can kill the branch or host plant, so the spread has to be controlled within reason. However, as mentioned, several of the trees on this property have hosted mistletoe for ten or more years, without issue.
Though seemingly a pointlessly destructive addition to a domestic garden, mistletoe is a keystone species: an important nesting site for a number of birds, and other organisms. It also has a rich ethnobotanical history here in Northern Europe.
In February (apparently the best time to attach them to trees) I’ll be getting a few seeds from these plants in the mail, and planting them on the apple trees we only use for flavouring liquor. Since we want to keep the harvest of these apple varieties small and manageable, it seems reasonable to add a beautiful and wildlife-attracting parasitic plant into the mix.
The embryonic leaves of Beech trees are so elegant.
We have a Beech hedge, so these seedlings are to be found everywhere in spring. They are easiest to spot and identify now, with their skirt-like cotyledons.
I envy your fortune. I’ve attempted Fagus spp. in the past with utter failure. Still not sure if it was my method or because perhaps my seeds were duds. Good to know what the seedlings of these guys look like!
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