The time has come the walrus said ...

The rich variety of leaf shapes on deciduous trees make their identification relatively easy in the summer months. Some tree guides offer silhouettes of the denuded trees as an aid to their winter identification. In practice this is difficult, as not only are the differences often quite subtle, but you need a free-standing tree, both for it to adopt its textbook shape, and to be able to see it clearly. Bark can be a helpful identification aid, but only for a limited range of trees including birches, cherries and poplars. I have found it much easier to identify trees in winter (at least to the genus level) by means of their buds, and have found the rich variety of buds a source of endless fascination in itself. Below I offer pictures of the buds of ten common deciduous trees to give some indication of the range of bud types that may be found. Of course, even before looking at the bud itself, the arrangement of buds helps distinguish opposite-leaved and alternate-leaved trees. Most twi

Many years ago, my wife and I, accompanied by our two young children, spent several years in China, teaching English and researching minority languages. For the last eighteen months of that period we taught in Jishou University in Hunan Province, and carried out research into the Tujia language under the auspices of the university. Besides a grammar of the language, published by Lincom, we produced a popular-level introduction to the Tujia, Imperial Tiger Hunters , which is now available as a free download (click on the link, the 5.5Mb PDF file is formatted for A5). The Tujia ethnic group are unusual among the 56 ethnic minority groups officially recognised in modern China. Very few of them speak the Tujia language, and the majority are not markedly culturally distinct from the Han population. As a result, although they are a very large group, they were not officially recognised until 1964, ten years after the original determination of ethnic groups. The reasons for this lie in their