Roderick Cameron's blog

The visit to Apple Park and the oak plantation there, during the first Post-Conference Tour, brought to mind another place I had written about previously in this blog.

On a recent trip to Bogotá, Colombia I was able to collect acorns from several Quercus humboldtii growing as street trees.

This year I harvested acorns in Grigadale Arboretum rather late in the season (April), at a stage when most species had dropped them. As trees are planted quite close together, in some cases I had to distinguish acorns based on their shape in order to collect from a particular tree rather than its neighbor. When it came to Quercus ×kewensis, there was a mass of acorns on the ground, many from several neighboring Q. cerris. I found that I could pick out the Q. ×kewensis because of their odd shape. 

Last April I briefly visited Canberra, the capital of Australia. I was able to take a day off to look at trees and spent most of it admiring the impressive collections of Australian native flora at the Australian National Botanic Gardens. This was my first trip to Australia and I had been looking forward to the diversity of its endemic trees. But Canberra also offered a quite unexpected treat: several Californian oaks used in well-maintained plantings along residential streets.