Inspired by another thread, this is a collection of trees in the wild to help us learn about tree species.
If a field trip to a certain species is out of the question, but you could use a little help from nature to inform your bonsai design and styling decisions, this is the place. You can search tree species using Ctrl+F.
If you’d like to add to the collection, please add a post with your picture(s) of the tree and the name of the species (include the latin if you can) so others can find it. Information like location, terrain (forest, coastal…), environment, age and size can be valuable if you know them.
Time to get into some trees closer to “home”. If you’ve seen the “spooky” tree @Ryan has made, you may like this.
This willow (Salix) lives right along the Rhine river in the city of Bonn, Germany - feels both spooky and majestic at the same time, especially near sundown!
Could be a weeping willow (Salix babylonis), but probably more likely a hybrid like Salix x sepulcralis or potentially Salix x rubens (especially since there is a variety called “Godesberg” and the city of Godesberg is litterally around the corner). Surely, some of the contortion is a result of human influence (you can see some work as it’s being done in the pix), and there’s probably more impressive specimen around, but I still find it fascinating. Maybe you do, too!
The first photo is a a wild damson, they grow like weeds in the woods where I collect and this is the old mother tree. You can see several different types of bark on the trunk from different stages in her growth.
Deciduous deadwood! This is all one tree, I think a sweet chestnut. Down at the road the trunk is around 2 metres wide. Over the years it has definitely fought a few battles with nature and lost some and won others. But despite that it’s holding on and doing well.
