Chair disposal

Following the successful installation of our new chairs, as reported at reference 1, the first two old chairs to go were the two in the garage, where they had been, very little used, for some years.

Once the property of one of the mental hospitals of the Exe Vale Hospital Group, possibly as much as a hundred years old, with one feature of antiquity being the much thicker timber from which they cut the seats than is the custom now. There may even have been a bit of shaping. And then there is the varnish, more brown wood than is the custom with furniture today, although I dare say it will come back again at some point.

While I failed to get the two backs looking the same size. Fiddling with neither the arrangement of the chairs nor the telephone angle seemed to go any good.

In any event, they are now the twin bastions to the southern flank of the big compost heap, wired together to further inhibit vulpine interference, ready for the arrival of the autumn leaves from the oak tree in the middle of the back garden. With the bastions in place, I will be able to heap the leaves up rather higher and steeper than would otherwise be the case.

Two tyres right protecting the eastern flank.

Viewed from the path.

While on the other side of the path, we have Mr. Compost Heap's waiting room, taking the next four most battered chairs, also wired to each other and to the fence beyond. Bee and wasp hotel left. Maybe the blue and white flag is actually some washing hanging up in the next door garden. A towel?

I may be spinning yarns about Mr. Compost Heap, the doctor of alternative medicine who lives down the bottom of our garden a bit later in the month. He may turn out to be a connoisseur of hedera who knows exactly how long it will take it to grow over the chairs. Patients be blowed. While I think Mrs. Heap will be very good with both mushrooms and omelettes.

All very wasteful really: all six chairs were serviceable if a little shabby, but I couldn't see them getting any takers without spending a lot more time on cleaning them up than I was willing to give.

The oak tree mentioned above, probably not a proper English oak, rather some exotic. It has not come out very clearly in this snap, but in the morning light, the tree has a very speckled appearance just now. Still mainly green but lots of splodges of yellow. Lots of acorns on the ground.

Unfortunately, the tree has a habit of shedding more than just the leaves, tending to drop twigs representing perhaps two or three years growth. There seems to be a permanent weakness where each year's growth starts in the spring. Something wrong with the abscission zones mentioned at reference 2?

Gemini offers a good story about a process he calls cladoptosis, the start of which is snapped above. Inter alia, he offers it as a healthy, natural and good response to water stress. 

A catch is that 'cladoptosis' is not in the index of reference 3, but maybe I will be able to find it somewhere, under some other heading. Perhaps Gemini has got a  penchant for ink-horn words. Only a minor catch though, as Wikipedia knows all about it. See reference 4.

PS: 'abscission' is present in OED, with the sense of cutting, but more in the medical way than the botanical way, which does not get a look in. 'Cladoptosis', from the Greek according to Wikipedia, does not get in at all. Nor does 'optosis'. The invention of some classically educated, 19th century botanist?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/a-flatpack-story.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/wigmore-late.html.

Reference 3: Trees: Their natural history - Peter A. Thomas - 2014. Around 250 pages of text, so quite short by botany text book standards.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladoptosis.