Spindle Revisited

The fruits of the Spindle tree are hanging around and although I try to ignore them they are just too vibrant to pass by. Anyway we have had Sloes and Hawthorn on here loads of times, so why not more Spindle berries?

This tree caught my eye because it still had lots of green leaves on it (I will show you in a minute) and I thought that I could do a post on how to identify Spindle.

It will be a short post.

I don’t mean how to identify it when it is covered in pink and orange berries…. I was thinking more about identifying it in Winter.

It is still going to be a short post. Spindle has very distinctive bark.

So here are some photographs that I took in March of this year when the leaves were just starting to appear.

There isn’t anything else in the hedgerow that looks quite like this.

These are young shoots the older wood loses some of the distinctive ribbing and green colour but it will still be evident on parts of the tree.

The leaves, when they start to open, are quite distinctive in themselves but green stripy bark is a dead give away.

Although I could find these trees quite easily in the winter and early spring as soon as the hedgerow started to grow I lost them again. It wasn’t until the fruits appeared in the autumn that they came back. Now I have a much clearer picture of their locations and plan to photograph them throughout the summer next year.

So that is the “Identification in Winter” bit done, that was just an excuse really to post more pictures of berries.

Berries and green leaves.