15 September 2024

The Abnormal, Gruesome Gall – Alien Invader in Your Yard

They appear as if from nowhere.  A previously healthy looking plant suddenly has an abnormal growth protruding from it.  Some are hideous and some strangely beautiful but they leave the plant looking as if it has been invaded by miniature aliens.  And in a way that’s exactly what has happened.  Take a look at the weirdness of the plant gall.

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1 March 2020

The Cannonball Tree

It is the case with a number of plants that they are given popular names which reflect how they look or what they do.  So it is with the Cannonball Tree whose fruit is so large that they look like cannonballs.  Not only that, when they fall to the ground a large noise is created similar to... you guessed it.

The fruit will of course fall when it is good and ready.  So you will not find a Cannonball Tree near a public pathway or a road.  One of these fruit, weighing in at several pounds and often up to ten inches in diameter could kill you.   So, you really want to avoid standing directly under them when they are in fruit.
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9 September 2018

Money Does Grow on Trees


Did your mother ever chastise you with the words money doesn’t grow on trees in a possibly fruitless attempt to curb your profligate ways? Well, maybe – just maybe – she was wrong.

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14 February 2018

Jabuticaba – The Tree that Fruits on its Trunk

No, this is not a belated April Fool’s prank. They look as if they may have been pinned there by an over enthusiastic gardener to impress the neighbors but the fruit of the Jabuticaba really does grow off the trunk of the tree.

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11 August 2016

The Lucky Tree of Chapel Rock

Nature can take hold in precarious places.  Chapel Rock on Lake Superior has a single tree perched atop its column.  By rights the tree should not be there: the small surface area of land on the top of the rock is insufficient to sustain a tree of this size.

There is hardly any topsoil, certainly not enough for an obviously thriving tree. How then does it flourish?
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5 July 2013

Baobab


I saw the trailer for Baobab a short time ago and have, ever since, been waiting for the full animated short to be released with bated breath. Once you watch it, I am sure that you will see why I have been anticipating this so much. Baobab is like the origin of a myth, a story which is handed down from generation to generation. Hundreds of years ago in Madagascar lived a baobab tree. She was the most beautiful tree in the forest, tall and graceful – a feminine sentience which nurtured the forest and its inhabitants. Her protector was a giant primate, fierce and loyal, who would die before harm befell his charge. Then, one day, man came to the forest.

Baobab was directed by Nicolas Loesner, Anaëlle Moreau, Marina Steck (no link, her blog is invite only, sorry), Simon Taroni and Benjamin Tron with music by Pierre Manchot. Here comes the remarkable part: the directors listed above were all students when they created Baobab, which makes us their graduation short from Supinfocom Valenciennes.

3 July 2013

Reconnected – Artist Reunites Illegally Felled Trees with their Stumps

Reconnected 1
Just over 400 years ago an infamous witch trial took place in Pendle, England. Last year, a group of artists were asked to commemorate the anniversary of the hanging of the ten innocents accused of practising witchcraft. Artist Philippe Handford, in a moment of pure inspiration as far as I am concerned, used a sad example of modern day vandalism to reconnect with the cruelty of yesteryear victimisation of the supposed supernatural.  You may need a tree stump removal expert in Austin, but these are staying in place for the foreseeable future.
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1 April 2012

The Returning Tree


Kuriositas is known for showcasing animations which might not otherwise get a broad audience on the internet – but it does have to be said that most we show are not intellectually challenging. We enjoy the chases, the escapade and the sheer vibrancy of animation which is made simply for the sake of the audience's amusement – and the laugh out loud element is often vital. However, sometimes animation is more than just that and so it should be – if it cannot at times confront its audience and provoke thought then it does not truly deserve to be considered an art form in its own right.

This being said, take a look at The Returning Tree. This is one of the more perplexing pieces I have come across this year but certainly one of the more visually stimulating and an incitement to contemplation if ever there was one. It was created by Yuri Serizawa as his graduation work at Digital Hollywood. I see it as a powerful extended visual metaphor for hope and the redemption of our species after our millennia long confrontation with nature. Perhaps and then again, maybe some higher power finally got fed up with us. Whatever you think, this is an animation that makes you think. And it’s pretty, too. What do you see?

1 February 2012

How Spiders Escaped the Pakistani Floods

When the floods hit Pakistan in 2010 the first thing that many people did was to head for higher ground. So too did countless millions of animals, among them spiders.  To escape the rapidly rising waters the spiders did the sensible thing and climbed up trees. The Ark in Space reveals the unexpected benefit of this strange migration.

Pictures courtesy of the UK Department of International Development on Flickr

17 October 2011

Who Wants to Live Forever?


What is the worst of woes that wait on age?
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?
To view each loved one blotted from life's page,
And be alone on earth, as I am now.
Lord Byron, Childe Harold

Image Credit Flickr User Martin LaBarr

19 August 2011

A Sealed Warning

9 July 2011

The Singing Ringing Tree

If you climb up in to the mountains away from the northern English town of Burnley you may come across something wonderful.  The Singing Ringing Tree is awaiting you and it has a song for your heart which may either chill or charm it.

Some have compared it to a wrecked spacecraft; others still associate it with the local folklore of the Pendle Witches, comparing the eerie noises that it makes to the incantations of the legendary sorceresses. Most, however, see it as a charismatic and alluring addition to the Lancashire landscape.

The remote location of the singing ringing tree is surely part of its charm.  Designed to look like a tree the curved and crooked shape of which has been determined by the wind, it is nevertheless very obviously made by the hand of man.  Art and nature come together in celebration as this 3 meter high sculpture sings its lonely song in the Pennine Mountains.

The concept is very simple – and therein lies the beauty. Designed by the Tonkin Liu partnership of architects, comprising of Anna Liu and Mike Tonkin, the Singing Ringing Tree is a set of galvanised steel pipes.  These pipes use the energy of the wind to produce a choral sound, discordant yet sharp.

Although some of the pipes are simply there to add to the impression of a tree, many are cut across their widths which then, when the wind blows, produce the sound.  The pipes have been tuned by the addition of holes on their underside, each according to their length and the note that they should produce.

The name of the sculpture comes from a cult and very scary German children’s TV series from the 1960s. The series told the story of a haughty princess who tells a would be suitor that she can only be persuaded in to marriage by his retrieval of the eponymous tree. 

Cue talking bears, wicked dwarves, scary forests and the like – the name itself is enough to induce a delicious shiver of fear in to those who were young at the time. Pictured left, imagine a fairy tale conceived by Wagner and directed by Fritz Lang, with nods in the direction of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and German expressionism, and you'd be close.

It was in full, glorious color, too, at a time when most TV in the UK was in black and white.  The irony that something so vivid originated from the then communist East Germany was completely lost on us kids, of course.

The sculpture has won a variety of prizes including the prestigious National Award of the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) for excellence in architecture.

25 June 2011

Attack of the Many Tentacled Carrot Creature!

With the spring rain comes the time for the Juniper to flower, yes?  From a distance it looks as if the blooms are large and orange. Yet wait a minute.  Doesn’t the juniper produce cones and nuts?  On closer inspection, unease turns to horror.  Large, alien looking, carroty gelatinous tentacles seem to have sprung up all over the tree. This is no precursor of alien invasion, however. This is cedar apple rust. It is in fact a fungus.

Cedar apple rust? A strange name for a fungus which affects the juniper, you might think.  Yet cedar apple rust is so names because it is a disease which requires two hosts to complete its life cycle.  To begin with it will spend the winter as a purple colored gall which looks a little like a brain (see below) on the branches of Juniperus virginiana.

When spring comes the orange telial horns (structures produced by rust fungi as part of the reproductive cycle) begin to spike out of the gall, gummy and viscous looking – something that you really would wish to avoid touching! These horns produce spores which blow on to the leaves and fruit of nearby apple trees.

It really does look, at the point the telial horns emerge, as if it has travelled through space, intent on colonising a new world. It doesn't just appear in isolated clumps either.  Sometimes it looks like a fool scale invasion is underway.

Yet when the spores germinate later in the year this new infection on the apple tree will produce horn-bearing spores too.  The spores are taken up by the wind and some will land on the juniper.  Then, the cycle of infection will begin again.

Although the glutinous orange mass looks deadly it does not kill either the juniper or its secondary hosts.  However, it will infect apples and will also defoliate the trees so whenever farmers discover it, they will naturally attempt to eradicate it.

That is a difficult job.  The plant pathogenic fungus is from an order known as Gymnosporangium and there are over 50 species in the genus which attack junipers.  This species produces a gall first of all, which is about the size of a golfball – easy enough to spot if you have sharp eye. Others, however, grow the telial horns directly from the bark of the tree.

So, the way that people in some areas have responded to the threat to their apples (not to mention pears and quinces) has been to cut down all the junipers and to ban the planting of any more in the region.  The Ozarks region in the US states of Missouri and Arkansas put in legislation in the 1920s.

They were not the first to fear and seek to eradicate the cedar apple rust – or species in its genus.  Roman priests would celebrate the feast of the god of grain, Robigus, on April 25 each year.  This would involve the sacrifice of a red dog in the hopes then that Robigus would stop the crops from being affected by the fungus.

Such radical measures are not taken these days (at least, it is hoped) but in the twenty first century growing disease-resistant cultivars is considered the most likely remedy.  Regrettably a good number of the commercially significant apple clones are prone to the disease. The cedar apple rust will continue to make the hearts of fruit farmers fall for a number of years to come, it seems.

18 October 2010

Don’t Stand Under the Cannonball Tree

It is the case with a number of plants that they are given popular names which reflect how they look or what they do.  So it is with the Cannonball Tree whose fruit is so large that they look like cannonballs.  Not only that, when they fall to the ground a large noise is created similar to... you guessed it.

The fruit will of course fall when it is good and ready.  So you will not find a Cannonball Tree near a public pathway or a road.  One of these fruit, weighing in at several pounds and often up to ten inches in diameter could kill you.   So, you really want to avoid standing directly under them when they are in fruit.

The tree (scientific name Couroupita guianensis is native to the south of the Caribbean and to the northern parts of South America.  Yet it has also been growing in India for at least two to three thousand years and the jury is out whether it is native there or somehow the trees were transported across the continents several thousand years ago.


This evergreen tree is something of a curiosity to say the least not least because its large brown fruit – its cannonballs – seem to be growing from the trunk of the tree.  The flowers too are something of an oddity, appearing in large vividly colored bunches up to twelve feet in length.  They have a wonderful scent – unlike the fruit.

The oddities do not stop there.  The flowers have no nectar but they do have pollen and as such pollination is done mainly by bees.  The pollen comes in two varieties as well, one which is fertile and another which has no obvious reproductive benefit.  The fertile pollen is produced on stamens which rub against the back of bees and is so carried on to another tree. The infertile pollen is bee food.

Take a look at the flower above.  The bee crawls in and heads for the infertile stamens - they are the ones on the oval ring.  The fertile ones which are on the longer ones directly opposite then rub on to the bee and are carried away with it.  In this was the Cannonball tree is allied to the Brazil Nut in as much as they have the same structure to the male part of the flower – the only two species of tree in the world to have such a structure.

The flowers (and so too the fruit) do not grow directly from the trunk but instead on a thick extrusion which itself develops from the trunk.  At the flower stage these extrusions seem way too huge for the flowers, which although large do not need such a thick and strong support.  It is only when the fruit appear and grow that their strength is obviously needed.

The common name for the tree is of course only a few hundred years old but the sound of the fruit cracking open on the ground made a name change obvious.  When the fruit cracks it lets out what can only be described as a foul stench.  Passing animals are attracted to this odor and when the seeds pass through their  digestive system they will hopefully land on fertile soil and a new tree will take root.

Anyone who lives in an environment where there are coconut palms will know that it is not a good idea to deliberately plant them near roads or paths. Fate can come knocking on to the head of an unwitting individual should they happen to be in the wrong (or is that right?) place when a fruit falls.

An odd tree, for sure.  But one thing is for definite. If you ever find yourself standing underneath one, keep one eye on the tree at all times.

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Valencia: Astonishing City of Arts and Sciences

There are not many places you can visit on Earth that enable you to imagine that you have been transported to a city of the future or, indeed, to an alien culture many light years away from our third rock from the sun. 

However, the City of Arts and Sciences is just that sort of place.