-----Original Message-----

A twisting trunk appears to have a "thicker" thickness of live wood in an
example just posted on the IBC Potensai Gallery entitled "twisted trunk."
Am I reading the layers correctly there?


Yikes! What a tree! Is it... um.... alive? Because with that bark beetle damage, I'd be willing to bet that none of that wood is functional.

I don't think you can judge the thickness of the living layer from evidence like that, because the part that looks like it's healed over the dead part is curved; all you are seeing is the outermost skin. All you can tell from that tree is that it suffered
a trauma and healed over, but the part that healed over may be dead now in the innermost sections.


Provisos: first, some tree rings are quite wide, so 3 or 4 of them would constitute a couple inches. In other trees, like bristlecones, the rings are very very thin. Second, *all* xylem is dead when functional- it's plumbing, and works by a mechanical p
rocess. The "ray cells" in wood are the living part. The xylem stops working because it gets plugged up with resin, because the layers closer to the surface crush it, or because it gets clogged with bacteria.

Nina

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