Our One Year Pond Study Week 18: Summer Tree Study

Welcome to week 18 of our one year pond study.  For the rest of the posts in this series please see here.

This week we concentrated on our chosen tree – the Ash.  Much had changed since our spring study.   If you look back you will see the Ash tree had flowers before it grew leaves.  The flowers are now gone, to be replaced by a huge number of leaves.

Here is the tree and the flower in the Spring:

And here is the tree and it’s leaves in the summer:

It is these leaves we decided to take a closer look at this week.  We used our Apologia Botany book and the Junior Nature Guide to Trees to find out some more:

We brought home a small twig which contained the clusters of Ash leaves.  On inspection the first thing we noticed was the new growth that occurred on the branch wherever there were leaves:

And that wasn’t all we noticed:

We, tentatively came to the conclusion that the flowers, which unusually preceded the leaves, actually formed the beginnings of the leaves.  And this is why they had to come first.  I couldn’t find any information which either confirmed or denied our postulations.  No matter.  They sounded good to us!

We then took a closer look at the actual leaves/leaflets and using the Apologia Botany book we were able to accurately describe those belonging to the Ash tree.  I did this exercise with the children because I wanted them to have some concrete vocabulary words to use to describe their tree, and I thought it would help them to distinguish it from, say, the Elder tree, which has similar leaves:

Having read up in advance about the Ash tree, it seems we made a good choice for our first tree study.  It has flowers in the spring, leaves in the summer and fruit in the Autumn and loses everything in the winter.   We’re looking forward to our Autumn tree study very much!