20th February 2017
When the sun is shining, what better way to enjoy the day than to spend time in the lofty heights of a Scots pine tree? That’s exactly what some tree climbers at Dundreggan were doing this week in an attempt to cache a nice bounty of cones for our latest contribution to the Kew Gardens Millennium Seed Bank. Sounds relatively straight forward, right? But when you need 10,000 seeds that are sitting snugly in their cones fifty feet up in the air, you can understand that this is no mean feat!
Scots pine cones are usually only found high up in the tree’s canopy, making seed collection that extra bit challenging. There is always the option to collect seed from the ground, but this can be even more challenging as the seeds will have usually been carried far by the wind! Cue the tree climbers…
Using all of the recommended safety gear, our climbers took no time at all in getting into the upper most reaches of our chosen trees. Scots pine cones take two years to reach maturity, so there are often cones of different ages on the tree at the same time. We were after the mature cones, identifiable by their grey-brown colour. At this point in the year, none of the cones should be open, and still have their seeds safely encased inside. Each scale on the cone contains 2 seeds, and it’s not unusual for cones to have as many as 50 scales, meaning a possibility of 100 seeds per cone.
Of course, not all of these seeds will be viable, but having collected an incredible 15kg of cones, we knew we were very likely to meet the 10,000 seed target.
Once the cones were brought down it was a simple matter of encouraging them to release their seeds to us by allowing them to dry out. All of the seeds collected will be heading down to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and will contribute to the Millennium Seed Bank.
More information about Trees for Life’s involvement with the Millennium Seed Bank:
Sign up to our mailing list to receive our monthly ‘Tree News’ e-newsletter and other occasional emails about volunteering, events, appeals and fundraising. It’s the perfect way to stay up to date with the latest news about the wild forest and it’s wonderful wildlife.
27th September 2019
12th April 2019
10th May 2019
17th May 2019