A stake in the ground

Quite often, in the course of my search for Wellingtonia on my travels, largely documented by the search key given below, I am unsure whether some tree is a Wellingtonia or not.

A large, mature tree usually has a distinctive shape and one is pretty sure what it is. But smaller trees do not have that shape and one has to rely on the micro features of leaves rather than the macro features of shape.

The present post records some micro features of the two young Wellingtonia which have been planted down Longmead Road. Planted with labels affixed so their is no doubt about their identification. A cut-down version of the post at reference 1. As ever, click to enlarge!

The micro feature which we can latch onto being the distinctive organisation of terminal shoots into scales rather than needles, flat (say, Yew) or round (say, Scots Pine). 

Part of a young tree

With a bit of Longmead Road visible at the top.

Detail

Scales clearly visible, together with terminal cones coming along. I think cones are sexed but I don't know which sex these ones are. I also think that the length of these scaled terminal shoots is unusual: other trees might have scaled leaves, but not on shoots of this length.

A different shot

Maybe a different tree.

Detail with some branch and trunk

Not yet worked out how distinctive the appearance of branch and trunk is.

A close-up

Detail

Moving onto something between macro and micro.

Small tree against winter sky

Reasonably distinctive organisation of terminal shoots. The bright green thing, bottom centre, is the back view of a sign for the industrial estate to the left.

Detail

With some of the shoots having a very spiky appearance when viewed against the sky from the right angle. But not here, without clicking to enlarge.

PS 1: ran into trouble with picture placement again. Maybe pictures not separated by text are particularly prone to problems. About to try publish and edit to see if that clears it. Too early in the morning for HTML view.

PS 2: got into HTML after all. Looks right published, but wrong in the editor. All very irritating, to me at least. And probably something the Blogger engineers who maintain the two editing views - HTML view and WYSIWYG (or compose) view - struggle to get right. They know about the problem but don't have the time and space to put it right. Something which Wordperfect attempted and which Word (this last from Microsoft) abandoned. Seemingly triggered here by the lack of text between the the third and fourth pictures, counting up from the bottom.

PS 3: this post was prepared on a laptop, where the images, all derived from my telephone, looked pretty good. Much more fuzzy on the much larger desktop screen, something more than twice the area of the laptop screen. As are the raw (6.5Mb) pictures from the telephone. Has Microsoft optimised them in some way for a laptop sized screen? Is the desktop screen - an HP HOMI - showing its age? Or is it all in the mind?

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/identification-of-wellingtonia-closed.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG.

Group search key: wgc.