Biology’s a bit less predictable.

(My dad’s PhD thesis was early work on the mathematics of dendritic growth. Turned out to be a rather difficult problem. I never understood the maths, but (as a child) I sure understood helping hand-collate copies of a 200+ page thesis )

Might be OT a bit, but then if you have a missing branch you might be able to get an idea of where it was. Long shot, though.

I have a half dozen published papers on the subject and knew one of the cutting edge scientists, a physicist, the late Dr John Rouse, from Melbourne Uni. Try “Basis for Synthesis of Spiral Lattice Quasicrystals”, Bursill L.A. et al, Modern Physics Letters B, Vol 3, No 14 (1989) 1071-85. I have a feeling that the 5/2 displacement is no longer supported by evidence, and I do not know of proof that maximum shading is the reason for the geometry.

Mention is often made of phyllotaxis in sunflowers. The “spooky” parts are (a) that the flower starts growing from the inside, yet later the outer seeds become separated by the magic angle and (b) the count of left-curving and right-curving parastichy is USUALLY two consecutive Fibonacci numbers – but sometimes a Lucas series is implicated. How do trees know math?

A large proportion of trees pictured seem to me have been victim of lightning strike. Evidence being number which have been split clean in two, and a number which have grown forked, but where I think I can see evidence of healed split eg. in tree second from left post 71.

Tree to left of tree 31 seems to be younger than tree 31, but has grown taller and straighter. Seems to me that lightening strike leads to greater girth as opposed to height.

Older trees are more likely to have been struck by lightning, and therefor more likely to have had growth influenced by lightning damage as opposed to other limiting factors like temp or water.

In general looking at all the tree picture, I was struck by the lack of uniformity of height, girth, and general overall dimensions. I have seen pictures of Redwood forests in the US, or pine forests in Europe were the trees were all very similar.

I think that in addition to having reservations about strip bark pine, there should be a more general reservation on pines, or any tree in a lightning prone area, or with marginal sustenance,

The trees are sometimes in groups, sometimes isolated. The isolated trees must be in locations where existance is marginal, otherwise others would have grown nearby.

Overall, I think that the selection of this type of tree, in a location where lightning strike is endemic, and where some of the sustaining factors must have been marginal for a long period of time. is a very poor choice for using tree ring growth as a proxy for temperature, aside from all the reservations already expressed. A possible proof of that would be some kind of cross correlation between trees. If they don’t correlate highly between themselves, shouldn’t they be ruled out?

Because he was too interested in tree cores? No..

Because the avoid reaction wood? No…

I think the real reason is that he only dated trees.