Island 2000 Trust Blog

Thank you to the ‘little angels’ at east Cowes Primary School who have made this fabulous Christmas Tree for the hoardings in East Cowes.

Here’s hoping you have a thoroughly amazing Christmas.

Don’t forget to tune in again next year.

Now that the autumn leaves are all but gone these striking growths have become very obvious in birch trees around the Island. They can look a lot like birds’ nests and a large birch can support over 100 of them. But they are in truth the result of a fungal infection.  The fungus is called Taphrina betulina (sounds like a Russian ballerina) and does a clever thing - it stimulates the tree to produce a mass of new growth (twigs and leaves) from the point of infection and then proceeds to feed on that larder. Surprisingly this  does little harm to the tree and strictly speaking this makes Witches’ Broom a gall, defined as an abnormal growth prompted by parasitic attack. The colloquial name for the gall originates in the belief that they were a sure sign of a witch having passed over.  Bearing in mind just how many of these things there are out there the Island sky must be fairly buzzing with commuting witches; now was that a crow flapping raggedly overhead just now or……..?

We are currently in the throws of a fairly extensive modification of the Gift to Nature website ready for 2009.  Please bear with us if anything on the site is not quite right over the next few weeks.  Everything should be in order by the end of December.