Category Archives: Photography

Perhaps it’s the lighting. Perhaps it’s the latest cold snap (it’s really not that cold) or rain (it hasn’t been that soggy) or something else. But the “big tree in the back yard,” which we’ve now pretty much decided must be some sort of ash tree, has gotten very confused. Or at least, one branch has, which is even more odd.

This particular tree will lose a bunch of leaves in the winter, but never all of them, and they never turn colors. They may fade a bit from bright green to a more pale green, but that’s it. Then they fall off. And the tree looks like this.

Except for this one branch. In the last 24 hours. At the wrong time of year.

Are we having some sort of aboreal  revolution here?

And even if we are, shouldn’t it have happened in October or November? Or maybe even December since we further south, maybe?

You know what? “Not my circus, not my monkeys!” Or in my case, “Not my float!”

It’s pretty in a subtle way. Yellows and browns and greens with just a touch of reddish shades here and there. And in the grey, rainy, gloomy, damp lighting of mid afternoon, it stands out.

YOU BE YOU, CONFUSED ASH!

After a week or more of fairly heavy rain that left everything well soaked, I had noticed a growth on our backyard tree that is almost certainly lichen.

The rain stopped early last week and it’s been dry for a few days. But the next storms are moving in (it’s raining now and we’re under yet another flash flood watch until Wednesday or so) so I took the opportunity this afternoon to take a look at the dried up lichen.

Several of these more colorful spots are still active.

A number of spots that were covered with the dark green lichen are now hard and white. All around the hard, white area in the center you can see areas of the “pock marks” that I think are structures of the lichen growths.

More flat, hard, white sections, surrounded by green pock marks.

There are also some new sections that have a reddish or pink tint.

Another pink-ish area, with lots of good detail on the “pock mark” areas.

We’ll see what the next round of rains bring out of these growth areas!

When talking about the lichen that I’ve discovered growing on “the big tree in the back yard,” the question again came up – what kind of a tree is it, exactly?

I’ve tried a couple of these free phone apps that will try to identify plants, but they’ve never gotten beyond “tree” before, except for one that got as far as “olive.” Since I don’t see any olives on it (and there are olive trees all over SoCal – this ain’t one of them!) I thought that was useless information.

Actually…

I downloaded the PlantNet app. It looks at various things like the bark…

…and leaves…

…and thought that it might be a green ash tree. But it’s not feeling super confident about that analysis, maybe one in four odds that it’s correct.

Then I tried the Seek app. It takes a look at the whole plant and as you move the camera around it starts trying to tie the pieces together (bark, size, leaves, flowers, etc) to come up with an estimate based on plant taxonomy. Remember that from sixth grade biology? Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species? (Neither did I, had to google it. I mean, I knew the concept, but the order and so on? Pffft!)

It pretty quickly established that our subject was part of the Olive Family. WHO KNEW??!!

Then things clicked!

I’m not 100.000% sure this app is right, but I think we can conclusively say that it’s some sort of ash tree! So where does that clue take us on the Interwebs? Here!

Looking through the various types of ash trees, I’m not 100% sure either the green ash or the velvet ash description is perfect. In particular, my tree gets some odd new growth every spring, and I don’t see anything that looks like that. And most of the descriptions in the article show seed pods that are unlike anything I’ve seen on this tree.

So, an ash tree of some sort, 99.99% sure. PROBABLY a Velvet Ash, about 90%+ sure, possibly a green ash.