Winter Tree ID at Cothele Estate-10th January 2016


For our first event of 2016, we headed to Cothele Estate in Cornwall for 
Winter Tree ID Workshop run by Chris and Esther..


Just back from Christmas and already making the tea..


Morning Tea Break, PEA standard...



Esther had already gathered some winter state tree samples for the ID introduction.... 



Bracken Fungi...


Our group of ID'ers for the day...



Although trees lose their leaves in the winter, they all have very specific features that you can use to help identify them all year round...


Ash-Can be identified by it's thick pale bark with a large buds at the end of their stems and little ones along their lengths...


Sycamore-Identified by their pointed egg shaped green buds growing in opposite pairs along the stems together.  


Beech, notable for it's long light branches and long slender buds... 


Hawthorn


Oak-Identified by it's green/grey bark with it's buds in little clusters together.


Our group were keenly making some notes of key tree features to look out for.



Once introduced to some trees stems in their winter state, we put our volunteers to the test in correctly identifying some trees around the orchard.


Hawthorn ID'd correctly with it's iconic thorns...







Cherry Tree-noted for it's black striped bark which becomes more prominent with age...


After our first id game and lunch, we took a walk around the estate to help our volunteers learn to identify trees in much more mature states...


Tree's ages and yearly growing conditions can be 
identified by varied number and sizes of it's rings...



One of the best views in the whole estate...


Cothele like many of our estates or walking sites 
have a huge variety of trees surrounding them so it was great for our team to begin 
to recognise them more and more as we went along...


A large bean tree leaf...


This tree was at least a couple hundred years old....


After are walk it was time for a final ID test...




It was great to see just how much everyone had learnt over just a couple of hours, and we hope their knowledge and interest in trees will continue to grow! 


Our fantastic group of newly inducted Tree-id'ers!

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