"Tree trunks: smooth in youth, rugged in old age" - Peter Thomas

Take a touch challenge:

Do you find you walk in the woods without ever actually touching anything natural?

Have you ever felt the different textures of tree bark or wondered why they are different?

Beech and holly tree trunks have elasticated waistlines. The smooth grey bark is very thin, only a few millimetres wide and stretches as trunks grow wider rather than splitting like other bark does. Look for how initials carved by the naughty people of past has stretched. Don't copy them! It damages the tree and could let in disease.

Look for and feel thin wrinkle lines where beech bark sags under its own weight.

Oak bark forms ridges because it "splits its clothes" and has to grow a larger size of bark underneath as the tree trunk grows outwards. The rough cracks create habitat for mosses, algae and lichen and small animals like harvestmen. See if you can find some tiny tree trunk animals.

Dig down a little with your fingers through some leaf litter. See if you can find the fine white strands of fungi or any tiny woodland soil creatures like springtails or woodlice or even if you are lucky a centipede or a millipede.

Smell

Petrichor: Why woods smell so nice after rain

Coined in 1964, combining the Greek for stone "Petra" with "Ichor" the fluid that flowed in the veins of the Gods, petrichor describes that lovely earthy smell of the ground and especially woods, after rain. Petrichor consists of dissolved organic compounds and molecules called Geosmin, a substance released from bacteria and algae in the soil. Many people find the scent uplifting.

The Good Earth

Woodland soils are rich in good bacteria and fungi metabolising the sugars and carbohydrates brought down to earth through the tree roots and the slow decay of leaf litter. Scrape back a few leaves and smell the sweetness of a small handful of the fine leaf litter beneath, noticing that the leaf fragments get smaller and smaller as the leaves compost to soil.

Everything under your feet is connected and in communication.

The wood-wide web of fungi that clothe and connect the mass of fine tree roots under your feet give the trees the soil nutrients they need, in return for sugars made in the leaves by the energy of the sun. Research has found that trees can pass nutrients and food along these fungal webs to help each other and even different tree species to create resilient woodland communities .

Find the beech stump

The tree was felled over safety concerns but gives the opportunity to see inside a tree trunk.

Always dead at heart, the inside, the wood of trees laid down as rings of living tissue each year is dead, but nutritious tissue which, as here, fungi will rot if they can get in past the protective bark. Fungi do not kill trees; they hollow them out, which can, but not always, make them unstable.

Look at the last browner outer ring of the tree. Made up of a ring of forever stem cells called the Vascular Cambium, which produces new water carrying cells on its inner edge (Xylem) that lift hundreds to thousands of litres of water per day up over 6 meters to the canopy, pulled up by water loss from the leaves. In turn, sugars made in the leaves from carbon dioxide and sunlight are pumped back down through outer cambium cells (Phloem). As these cells age, they are pushed out by the growing wood, die and become the bark. As long as the cambium ring stays unbroken, the tree will live.

There are tens of thousands of tiny unbroken water columns just micrometers wide (0.000001 of a Meter) in each tree all around you. The trees stay full of water even in winter when there are no leaves to pull the water up by evaporation. How do they manage that?

Prepared by Kathy Meakin on behalf of Twinberrow Foundation, November 2023.

Many sources were consulted in preparing 'wander and wonder' information. Peter Thomas, 2000, Trees: their Natural History, Colin Tudge, 2006 The Secret Life of Trees and Peter Wohlleben 2017 The Hidden Life of Trees deserve special mention.