Inosculation: Two shall be joined as one

Inosculation? Can the Nature Notes guy not even spell inoculation?  

 

Actually, I can, but this article is about inosculation. The “s” is important, and no needles or syringes are involved.  

 

As a brief aside, my wife, Jenny, is a master of the English language. She is a wonderful pre-editor, but she is not nearly as appreciative of puns, dad jokes and silly word play as our daughters and I are. You can thank her that this article isn’t titled “Reunited and it Feels so Wood” by this middle-aged nostalgist.

 

So, what is inosculation? To those familiar with the practice of grafting in horticulture, it is basically a natural version of grafting. To those not familiar with grafting, inosculation is when two separate parts of a plant, or two separate plants, grow together as one.

 

There is a wonderful example in an old oak at the corner of Smythe Street and Pierce Street inside the “Pirate Park” fence. Some recent storm damage required that a large part of the tree’s main trunk be removed. This thinning opened up a better view of the rest of the tree, and I was quite surprised by what I saw. Two major limbs

that once grew separately had merged farther out from the trunk and grown back together again. This, I learned, is inosculation.

 

Trees have an outer layer of visible bark, a thin layer of inner bark known as phloem, and then their cambium, or growth layer. Farther inside are the sapwood and heartwood. If two branches or limbs rub together enough to wear off the bark and get into the inner layers, the cambium will sometimes begin to grow together, allowing the two separate members to join as one. The two limbs will fuse, and a single limb will grow where once there were two.

 

According to an article by forester Matt Kelly on the University of New Hampshire Extension’s website, inosculation can occasionally occur between separate trees of the same species or, even less frequently, between trees of two different species. Kelly’s article notes that inosculation is most common in hemlock, white pine, maple, birch, ash and American beech trees.

 

It seems appropriate for some of these centuries-old Lowcountry oaks to have limbs that rejoin that from which they came.  

 

The old saying holds true that Charlestonians worship their ancestors and their oak trees, and I would have to admit that an honest examination of my own family tree shows some evidence of human inosculation. A family friend here is a descendant of one of the most prominent old Charleston families, and she spoke about attending a reunion where each guest’s name tag had a colored dot for the branch of the family from which he or she descended. She couldn’t help but notice that some folks wore multiple dots from multiple branches and whispered quietly to her daughter, “Now, this might explain some things!”  

 

If only these old trees could talk.