Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Photo friday- textured

The word 'textured' made me think of tree bark. I take a lot of photos of trees and i've developed a habit of photographing the branches against the sky and the texture of the bark.
I think its interesting to see how the trees change throughout the year , from the stark bare branches of winter and spring to the masses of summer leaves in all their different shades of green. Not forgetting the oranges, browns and yellows as summer turns to autumn.

This is the bark of the London Plane tree, Platanus x acerifolia . Its peeling bark is really attractive , and very reminiscent of camouflage clothing. .

The bark is shed in irregular pieces and exposes different bark layers. the inner bark is a pale yellowish grey, the mid bark is a greenish grey and the outer bark is mid brown.

The trees can be variable in the bark colours, some are more dramatically coloured and 'patchwork looking' than others.

This is a close up of the bark showing how the different layers are exposed. Close-up it looks like map contour lines.
The upper branches of the plane tree. The branches are cut back at the beginning of winter by the local council which tends to produce a lot of small spindly branches taht get covered in leaves by teh summer.
When the trees are initially cut back it looks incredibly severe, as if the trees will never recover; but they bounce back stronger than ever the following year.
Old Olive trees [Olea europaea] have very characteristic gnarly bark., As they age, they start to look like twisted old people . Some of the really old trees look as if they come to life and start moving slowly around, like Ents, when humans aren't watching. Or maybe they could be trolls or the elderly wise folk who talk in riddles in fairy tales.

Their bark gives plenty of crevices for creepy crawlies ,small animals and other plants to grow. Some of the fallen black olives are just about visible here -its easier to see in the original photo Some small succulents and a couple of other plants have taken root in some of the holes in the olive trunk. The black olives are in various stages of decomposition - they are eaten by birds etc

The sky through the olive trees branches. Olives are evergreen, so they have plenty of leaves in winter.

This is a photo of the texture of the trunk of a tall palm tree.

And this is a photo of branches of the same tree . It reminds me of a peacock's tail feathers from this angle.Technorati Tags:








4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alison,

These are all so interesting. Thanks for sharing your time and expertise. You see your world in ways that I love learning about. Tree bark...who knew? And it's fun to see the little plants that have taken hold in the bark; tiny little civilizations in places that seem inhospitable.

Meilleurs voeux!!

Maggie said...

How lovely to see your photos of the London Plane tree. We had one right outside our house (in fact there are a row of them outside the two terraces of houses on our road), but it was chopped down a few years back, and now we have a lime tree. The Plane trees were damaged when the pavement was dug up for cable to be installed around 20 years ago... Initially they seemed to be OK, but then the council used the wrong dose of herbicide, and several of the trees had to be removed. :-( I've always meant to take some photos of the bark - it really is striking. Maybe I'll get to it over the next few days.

natural attrill said...

The first 2 photographs are beautiful, like paintings. The shapes and colours are lovely.
Penny.

Alison Ashwell said...

bluevicar - I was glad to be able to help out. ;)

maggie - what a shame about teh trees being posioned- they seem generally hardy trees too. The variations of the bark patterns between different individual trees can be really striking.

Penny- glad you liked them :)