Week 98: Trees
July 18, 2020
- This week we went on a walk planned by Tree Talk. As far as I can tell, the site uses data about trees in London to point out some trees of note (usually especially uncommon ones) along a route. There are LOTS of uncommon tree species around us, and probably everywhere actually, I guess because the commonality of tree species contains a long tail of uncommon ones. The website isn’t very good on mobile, and most of the trees don’t have images so you have to look them up separately.
- The most common street tree in London is the London Plane. It’s a hybrid of the American Sycamore and Oriental Plane. It’s the only tree that I’m allergic to.
- Somewhere on the internet I read something about city tree planting. A while ago, when people were planning these things, it was determined that planting male trees was best as they create pollen, but not fruit / seed husks. It was thought that pollen was easier to clean as it would just blow away. So most of our urban trees are male and release loads of pollen. The irony is that only fertilised trees drop fruit, so if we’d planted all female trees then we’d have had neither pollen or fruit to tidy up. I can’t find the original thing I read about this, but here’s an article about it from last year anyway.
- Can I share two very minor problems I have? Of course I can, it’s my blog.
- The instagram discover tab is something I scroll through quite a bit, especially now I’m awake feeding the baby. But the algorithm, while mostly showing me trash or craft things which is what I want, also thinks I want to see extreme close-ups of people squeezing spots. These videos completely disgust me and I just want them to go away. I mark them as “I don’t want to see this” but doing that involves tapping on them which means looking at them.
- In animal crossing there is no haircut that is close to what my hair is currently doing.
- We’ve had the first garden tomatoes and they are so so so much tastier than supermarket tomatoes.
- E has taken to waking up in the night, going to her bedroom door (which has a baby gate across it) and saying mournfully “Mummy, there’s another baby trapped in here…”. Precision manipulation of my guilt about bringing in a new baby and having less time to spend with her. Well done.
- (Because I’m anosmic) I tried to get L to tell me how the new baby smells. He says the baby smells “soft”. I wish I could smell him.
- We watched United Skates on iPlayer. Hoo boy, it was great. It’s a documentary about the importance of roller discos to parts of the black community in the US. I had no idea there was such cultural richness in roller disco, different cities having their own distinct styles, the music, the custom skate shoe hacks. It was really interesting.