Rowan and mountain ash are the same tree.
They are the same. Fucking. Tree.
I chose this for today's fun fact because I was reminded of a story from when we were cutting council trees.
So, we were cutting the epicormic off some lime trees and bringing them back to the boundary of the houses on a council job, and at one stage a woman from a few houses down from the tree we were working on came out and called us over
She had a rowan tree out in front of her house, and it had some epicormac coming up from the base, which i guess looked like it may have been sprouting out of the ground. Fair play to the woman, and credit to her, she was worried about the health of the tree. The conversation went a little something like this"
Woman: there's another tree growing out of my tree! Is that going to kill the big one?
Workmate: no, that's actually part of the same tree. It's reactive growth. It means the tree is under stress. It's probably because of the roadworks that are happening around here damaging the roots
Woman: no, they're different trees! Look, this one has different leaves to that one!
Workmate: yeah, because that’s new growth. If you look at the tips of the branches on the main tree you can see that the leaves are the same on both. The new growth looks different to the old growth
Woman: no! They're different! That one's a rowan, and that one is a mountain ash!
Workmate: those are the same tree
Woman (smugly, into the face of a professional tree surgeon): well, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Woman (chuckling to her husband, who just came out of the house): he's trying to tell me that these are different trees
She was so fucking smug about it. Like, lady, you don't know more than us because you spent three minutes on Google. This is our job. We know which trees are which... sometimes
So there you go! Two fun facts and a story. Don't I just spoil youse?
