The big picture
For oaks, elms and other deciduous trees, winter beauty is all about the bones and those amazing silhouettes, writes MICHAEL McCOY
Our grand old oak tree has been leafless for nearly two months now. I love the great bubble of space it captures and embraces, as if with its open fingertips. English oaks like this have a muscularity that carries through their every part. The bare skeleton is the picture of strength, from the stout, over-engineered trunk, to the huge, weighty horizontal branches, diminishing naturally and predictably at every branching point through to the chunky growth tips that are carrying buds like fat little acorns, ready to stare down the winter.
Lindens are more predictable again in outline. Side-branches ascend from their departure point from the trunk, but then at an apparently predetermined point, reverse gracefully on an angle so that a single old major branch can describe a perfect gothic arch. An avenue of them will have you convinced that they’ve been carefully shaped for purpose.
I’m grateful to ornamental pears for their spring flowers, autumn foliage and tough adaptability. But the winter outline is their weak point. Branches jut out at the oddest dislocated angles and are congested with spurs. A reasonably sized main trunk often multi-branches at a single point, with no steady hierarchical decrease in size, resulting in a structure that brings to mind a wooden shaving brush. Any cut or accidental damage to this already arthritic form is likely to result in dramatically vertical regrowth, further confusing its lines.
English elms have an outline like a cumulus cloud, very like the oaks, and a roughly similar bone structure. Golden elms, on the other hand, send multiple shoots up in an almost radiating form in youth, as if every branch is acutely aware of its neighbour and is doing its best to stay equidistant from the others. Until they get too old to care, however, and the dense, even canopy starts to open up here and there, getting better and better, and more idiosyncratic, with age.
Every species of deciduous tree has a signature pattern of branching – a characteristic silhouette when bare. While their outline is what you ‘read’ in the warmer months, the winter is all about the bone structure, and that rewards close-up scrutiny. Whoever stated that familiarity breeds contempt needed to add that it also breeds equal, if not greater, levels of fondness.
Michael blogs at thegardenist.com.au