Tree With Really Thick, Crackly Bark
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Thick Bark very thick bark -- Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2009 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/1600 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1000 — map & image datanearby photos
Thick Bark
very thick bark

Sorry for the lack of interesting posts lately... I've been going all out working on my Lightroom plugins lately, and seem to have no time for blogging. The plugins are like black holes.... I've got a new one in the works, and the nearer I get toward being able to release it, the more energy I devote toward reaching that goal, sucking energy away from, well, pretty much everything else.

Anyway, today's (uninteresting) post is about a tree I noticed on the grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace park, during a family bike ride two weeks ago. It was a fairly large tree, but I neglected to get a shot with something to show scale, so here's the best I happened to have:

Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2009 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 28 mm — 1/1600 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1000 — map & image datanearby photos

The bark was all cracked into sections, like an ice floe breaking up. Except it was clear that this is how it grew. Some of the fissures were two inches deep....

Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2009 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/800 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1000 — map & image datanearby photos
Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2009 Jeffrey Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 31 mm — 1/320 sec, f/4.5, ISO 1000 — map & image datanearby photos

I've no idea what kind of tree it was (and in retrospect, had I had any smarts, I would have taken a picture of its branches / leaves).

Odd.


All 5 comments so far, oldest first...

Looks like pine. We have pine trees in Finland and they all have that nice bark on them. But those pines that we have dont have so big craks…

— comment by Teemu on June 13th, 2009 at 10:01pm JST (14 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

That bark reminds me of the bark of the Cottonwood tree of the Dakotas that is so favored by woodcarvers. (Only coming from fallen trees, of course) I’ve carved some whimsical birdhouses, etc. from it and it carves easily, almost like soap. It does tend to chip off in flakes if the knife catches it wrong. Jeff, do try to get photos of the leaves/needles, branch structure or something for a better identification. Maybe we’ll hear from Peter.

— comment by Grandma Friedl, Ohio, USA on June 14th, 2009 at 10:11pm JST (14 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Peter’s never far away, in fact just back from a brief holiday !

My first thought was, like Teemu’s, that it is a pine, perhaps Pinus thunbergii or P. densiflora but, as Grandma Friedl says, we need more evidence !

— comment by Peter in Wales on June 15th, 2009 at 4:27am JST (14 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

Looks like Cedar to me.

— comment by Nibar on June 15th, 2009 at 10:07am JST (14 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

In the last photo there seem to be some pine-like leaves at the top left part…Out of focus, maybe, but they do look like pine needles

— comment by Highlord on June 16th, 2009 at 6:43am JST (14 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink
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