Ancient alder
Pilings made of alder wood (one of the commonest wet woodland trees) were used to make the bases for Scottish loch dwellings – ‘crannogs’ – many thousands of years ago. Alder also helped to give the underpinning for Amsterdam and Venice.
Tough job
Oak bark was once used for the tanning of leather. Because of the substances (such as dung) used in traditional tanning in the Middle Ages, tanners often lived at the edge of towns and villages – preferably downwind of the rest of the inhabitants.
Undercover conifer
Although it doesn’t have obvious cones, juniper is classed as a conifer. That’s because its ‘berries’ (once used to flavour gin) are in fact female seed cones, with fleshy scales that join together to look like a berry.
Some like it damp
Mosses and liverworts are two of the most important kinds of plants in Atlantic oakwoods. They don’t have roots, so rely on water from rainfall and surface run-off to get their food. No wonder they like the temperate rainforest conditions in Scotland’s moist western oakwoods and in the gorges of places like the Clyde Valley.
Barnet booster
Some people reckon that wine made from the sap of birch trees promotes hair growth and so can slow down the development of baldness. But perhaps that feeling depends on how much birch wine they drink at any one time.
Sussed sites
Phil Baarda, Highland Birchwoods manager for the Core Forest Sites Project, used to work with tribes people in south-east Asia, He helped them to find ways of making their harvest of swiftlet nests (taken from high up in caves) sustainable.
A rare thing
Richard Thompson is a name that people with an ear for a good melody and lyric may associate with a particular English singer-songwriter. But it’s also the name of the person who did excellent research work for Core Forest Sites in both oak and ashwoods (for example, Thinning in Atlantic oakwoods: assessing options at the stand scale) - and who happens to play a mean saxophone.
Wee biters
The Highland midge, which can be a bane (and pain) for summer visitors to Scotland’s western woods, spends most of its life as a larva in the water film of damp soil or mossy bogland. It’s only the females that bite, and they can mate within a day of becoming free flying.
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