Needles

This is how pine needles are made!

You may remember in a blip, way back in November, that I showed you the small clusters at the end of the Scots pine branches, clusters which looked very like sugared almonds.. Well I promised to come back when these had grown a little and they have taken me by surprise by suddenly bursting forth and all the young Scots pines are proudly waving candelabras at their tips as this one has grown from just one of the small buds and the others are the same size, all sprouting from the single branch tip. I am only showing one, however, as I wanted to show you in closeup how the needles develop as the bud grows and lengthens. If you are able to look at this in large you will see that each pine needle is carefully encased in a sheath, presumably to protect it through the winter, and very soon all these will have burst forth taking on the familiar look of a bottle brush.