Bees are thieves! It’s official! After my recent note pointing out that bees were seemingly harvesting pollen from a Quercus suber without any commensurate benefit to the tree, serendipitously the latest issue of the magazine The Plantsman contained an article giving a synopsis of research into "bee plants" by the National Botanic Garden of Wales, prompted by the alarming dip in global bee numbers.
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Over the first hundred days of 2018 I have read Dante’s Divine Comedy, as part of a mass-reading organized on Twitter by Pablo Maurette, an Argentine Literature Professor and author at the University of Chicago. Thousands of readers spread across the globe read one canto per day of the classic poem, and exchanged comments and engaged in debates under the hashtag #Dante2018. Oaks are not absent...
Posted Thursday, 19 April 2018 - 1:46pm in Roderick Cameron's blog
This year I have received an unprecedented demand for oaks. This is exhilarating and exciting. One client bought 15 Quercus lobata. Another took about 50 oaks to Ireland. Another from Italy enquired for 120 different oaks in twos and threes. An enquiry for 60 oaks has just come in. It is very encouraging that oaks are becoming so important and that they are wanted in small quantities and large.
Posted Thursday, 19 April 2018 - 6:25am in James Harris's blog
An oak which breaks the rules... Do oaks have rules? Well, I think so: the rule of survival of the fittest implies that all unnecessary branch structure is unaffordably costly in resources – the aim of a tree should be to display the maximum leaf area for photosynthesis attached to the minimum possible structure. And the culprit in question? Quercus saltillensis.
Posted Friday, 16 February 2018 - 1:46pm in Shaun Haddock's blog
It was a mast year in 2017 here in southwest France, spreading acorns so thickly under some trees they formed a solid carpet. So Quercus pubescens is evidently not in danger for now, but what of less plentiful species elsewhere?
Posted Friday, 16 February 2018 - 12:28pm in Shaun Haddock's blog
Many readers will have seen the reference on the IOS website to the publication online of the 8th edition of W.J. Bean’s Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles under the auspices of the International Dendrology Society (IDS), and many, particularly those who are members of the IDS, will be aware of the publication, with the cooperation of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, of New Trees, which, in effect, brought “Bean” up to date by covering trees introduced to cultivation after Bean’s publication in the 1970s.
Posted Friday, 16 February 2018 - 11:06am in Shaun Haddock's blog
A young and vigorously growing Quercus ‘Maya’ that we planted in 2007 showed a minor crack at the base of the trunk after the winter of 2011-2012...
Posted Thursday, 15 February 2018 - 11:45am in Gert Fortgens's blog
I spent a weekend in Bogotá in October 2017 and made it my mission to find Quercus humboldtii. I had had the species in my sights for a long time: it is the only oak native to South America, and so the closest non-cultivated oak to my residence in Montevideo, Uruguay (a mere 4,700 km as the crow flies—though it might take a relay of crows to make the trip!).
Posted Sunday, 10 December 2017 - 1:29pm in Roderick Cameron's blog
It is our vision that when the years roll on and you reach your eighties that you do not down size nor retire but that you have projects. To realise this we took back from our tenant farmer an area of land to add to our garden. We decided to plant out a collection of oaks.
Posted Thursday, 7 December 2017 - 2:52pm in James Harris's blog
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