Last week, a wildlife agency said that 80% people in Britain couldn’t recognise ash trees from the leaves and only half could identify oaks.
What chance, then, does Elisabeth Wheeler have for recognition of species from her database of thin sections of timber? See the whole database of more than 35,000 images from 200 plant Families at www.insidewood.lib.ncsu.edu
Magnolia flowers are more familiar –
And maybe Van Gogh had a better chance with his olive trees being recognised:
The second and third pictures above (the black and white ones) show thin sections of olive timber magnified about x100 under a microscope.
Here, the second picture shows cells of pine timber, a transverse section across one whole year’s growth, the third picture is a longitudinal section showing the length of the cells. Their size reflects the rate of growth, itself dependent on the weather. This is why the study of tree rings, dendrochronology, can help reconstruct past climates.