Lammas Growth - 12 September 2024

Walking in a nearby wooded area a couple of days ago I saw this very interesting oak tree :

_{I only know it’s an oak because of the characteristic shape of the leaves.}

As you can see in the photo this area had a lot of relatively new trees that were very close together. I felt that many of the trees were either a bit dead or had already lost most of their leaves. Many of the branches of this oak were dry or just bare :

You can see in both photos that this looks more like autumn or winter than summer because of the colour of the fallen leaves and because it was late in the evening.

I was very surprised then to find that the otherwise sad looking trunk had very vibrant new growth. Those young bright green branches were just coming out of the trunk and you could see a few leaves as well.

When I went back home I decided to do a search to find out whether or not this type of sudden growth had a reason or a name. It was hard trying to find something meaningful as my search prompt was rather vague : ‘new growth on dead oak tree trunks’. The types of possible answers I managed to generate were not great.

One possible explanation was offered here:

Lammas growth, also called Lammas leaves, Lammas flush, second shoots, or summer shoots, is a season of renewed growth in some trees in temperate regions put on in July and August (if in the northern hemisphere, January and February if in the southern), that is around Lammas day, August 1.

The date is not quite right as I’m writing this in September, but perhaps as it’s been a rather wet summer the trees are a bit behind in their growth cycle.

The mere mention of the Lammas Day on 1 August caught my eye too so I decided to investigate that topic.

I found the answer quite quickly here and I’m a bit embarrassed because I’d never heard of this before :

Lammas growth occurs around (and takes its name from) Lammas Day, or Loaf Mass, a Christian holiday derived from pagan traditions that celebrated the very first harvest of the year around August 1st.

It was really interesting to find out about this arboricultural term. I find it a bit daunting to discover this type of term associated with beliefs and concepts that stem back from old times and that will be lost unless we spread our discovery about them. I’m only touching on this topic today but I’ve continued reading and learning about it.

Thank you for reading !