Long time - no pics.

[sister_luck]

Today I took the first pictures of 2009. I've been missing that, but with being stuck in the house most of the time, there wasn't much opportunity for my hobby especially as still life photography isn't really my forte. Today's attempts turned out pretty dismal.

But I discovered the last batch of 2008 pictures on my camera and here are two that I took on Christmas Day in Smalltown on a walk with my family:








A related question for you: Photobucket keeps annoying me, any idea where I should move my pics? Flickr seems a lot less cluttered.

Comments

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

The red beech trees are stocky here, too, but the others (sylvatica I believe) can grow very tall: without leaves (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fagus_sylvatica_003.jpg) or with leaves (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beechforest062005.jpg).

[lijability.livejournal.com]

Ahh... I forget that Europe has several species of Beech. We just have the one, American Beech - Fagus grandifolia. This bonsai (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_Beech,_1979-2007.jpg) even reminds me of the trees in our back yard.

We don't have many forests which are reproducing beech trees around here any more. The head forester from Purdue University told me a few years ago that the woods on my mother's farm (about 170 acres) is one of the few in the state of Indiana that is producing young beech trees naturally. We have a forest in the southern part of our county called the Beech Hills but even that is not reproducing many beech now. Probably because the 3 or 4 people who owned the land in the Beech hills subdivided it and sold it off to people who started building houses down there. People can ruin a good thing sometimes; the Beech Hills were good mushrooming grounds too.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

We've got lots of beech trees in our forests here, but they're mostly cultivated forests anyway, so all trees form straight lines. (Which made me totally angry when I watched Gladiator because back then our forests of course didn't look like that.)

But I've been wrong with the terminology - we call sylvatica red beech (Rotbuche) because of its slightly reddish wood. What I meant when I was talking about red beeches are actually sylvatica f. purpurea and they're usually called Blutbuche, i.e. blood beech.