Saturday, 8 July 2017

Hot afternoon

It is a hot afternoon, too hot to be outside and too warm to work inside, so I was gazing idly at the laptop and noticed the icon for DPLA, the digital public library of america of reference 2. For some reason, I then thought of the liriodendron tulipifera at reference 1. Could I check my memory that it was the state tree of Kentucky?

Type the name into the DPLA search box and get a range of pictures of same, some old, some new. This one, from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, seems to have been taken with very high resolution and very deep focus, coping with large amounts of zoom. Bit more flashy than my telephone. No essays about the trees to be seen, just pictures - but including a couple of pictures of very large trees being taken down with a two man cross cut saw. Long time since I was fit and strong enough to try such a thing, although I do still own a fairly large one man cross cut, no doubt picked up from some car booter. I think it has been used once, but given the number of hits for the search term 'cross cut saw' on the blog archive, too tedious to check.

Furthermore, DPLA was not very good at state trees, so I went back to google, which turned up the wikipedia entry, which told me that it was the state tree of Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Memory right for once, but also telling us that states do not get exclusive rights. And that these trees can grow to 50m in the forests of the Appalachian Mountains, getting on for twice what our English oaks can manage. Oddly, wikipedia is strong on age and circumference of these last but coy about height.

PS: Knoxville is a place we must have driven through, on our way from Bristol to Chattanooga, a place where the Tennessee runs deep and blue and is bridged with huge, curved I-beams. Not like the Thames at Westminster at all. Nor do I imagine that we still have the technology to make the beams. An occasion when we thought about visiting Oak Ridge, where they once made big bombs, but did not, in the event, make it. With the laboratory now being yet another public-private partnership. See reference 3.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/liriodendron.html.

Reference 2: https://dp.la/.

Reference 3: https://www.ornl.gov/.

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