10/18/2022
You may have noticed a lot of tree seeds around at the moment – it's a bumper year for acorns, beech nuts, hawthorn berries, chestnuts, hazelnuts and other tree seeds.
This is a natural phenomenon, but you might be interested to learn a little bit about why it happens. Trees don’t produce seeds every year. When they do, it’s called a mast year and the idea is that they will produce lots, all at the same time and they coordinate it so that all of the trees in the same area will seed simultaneously.
This year is a mast year, but it’s an unusually big one, and this is probably down to the summer we just had. Record high temperatures and low rainfall has put trees under stress, which has encouraged them to generate seeds as a way of making sure their genes survive. It’s a very expensive exercise for the trees – they put a huge amount of energy into making seeds, but the idea behind it is that if there are so many seeds there will be more that don’t get eaten and will therefore germinate.
It’s the same principle as salmon spawning in their thousands and cicadas hatching all at once... and another example of why trees are really, really cool. 🌳💚
📷 Chris Lacey
