ABSTRACT THURSDAY - TEXTURES

Today has been an emotional day, for reasons I won’t go into, but bearing in mind the theme of the Abstract Thursday challenge was textures, on my way to an appointment this morning, I stopped to look at one of the very large London plane trees that line one of the main roads near our town centre.

I did get some strange looks from people on buses and I heard a child say to its mother, as they passed me, “Why is that lady taking a photograph of the tree?”  I didn’t explain, but they probably thought I was just an odd lady!

You may wonder how I knew it was a London plane tree and I certainly wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t picked up some seed balls when I was in Devizes last week.  Mr. HCB didn’t know what they were either, so we did a search on Google.

We found out that they came from a London plane tree that is London’s most common tree, hence the name, that it can grow to 35m and live several hundred years.  

We also found out : "Its attributes were discovered in London where the new hybrid first appeared around 1645. The tree was found to thrive in the sooty air and provide wonderful shade and its ability to withstand air pollution, drought and other adversities assures its popularity as an urban tree." 

This tree is well worth admiring, so I did just that.  The bark, as you can see, is olive green and grey with large scaly pieces and the leaves, which were still green, are large and thick with five triangular lobes.  This particular tree trunk had lots of lichen in beautiful colours and textures, which I thought fitted in well with the theme for today.

Apparently, the seeds are often eaten by squirrels, but I doubt there would be many on this particular road, which is a dual carriageway and therefore quite busy, and I would hate to see squashed squirrels on the road.  I also understand that goldfinches are rather partial to the seed.  

I have learned a lot about this particular tree but have never stopped to look at it in detail before.  However, I’m glad I did - when did you last stop and look at the bark on a tree?

“Imagine if trees gave off wifi signals; 
     we would be planting so many trees 
          we'd probably save the planet too. 
Too bad they only produce 
     the oxygen we breathe.”
Anon