CHAPTER XXIV.
EXCRESCENCES (continued).
Cankers—Burrs—Sphaeroblasts, and other excrescences of woody tissues—Witches' Brooms.
Cankers are irregular excrescences due to the perennial struggle between tissues attempting to heal up a wound, and some organism or other agent which keeps the lesion open. A canker always originates in a wound affecting the cambium, and usually in a small wound such as an insect puncture or frost nip; if undisturbed the dead parts would heal over by cork and callus, but if recurring frost-cracks break open the coverings, or if insects or fungi penetrate the callus and invade the cambium, irregularities of growth due to the occluding tissue on the one hand, and continued growth of the still unimpaired cambium on the opposite side of the injured shoot on the other, result in the canker. Frost cankers occur on fruit-trees, Vines, Beeches, etc.
Cankers due to insects are found on Apples, the cortex of which is punctured by the woolly Aphis (Schizoneura) while the twigs are young, and the wound is kept open by the insects nestling in crevices in the occlusion tissues. Species of Coccus, Lachnus, and Chermes also produce cankers on forest trees.
Cankers due to fungi usually originate in a wound primarily due to an insect puncture or bite, or to frost, the invading fungus hyphae making their way into the wounded tissues and gradually extending more and more into the cambium and the occluding callus. Among the best known of these wound fungi which cause cankers are Dasyscypha Willkommii the peziza of Larch disease, Nectria ditissima and N. cucurbitula on Beech and Conifers; less common are Scleroderris on Willows, Aglaospora on Oaks and some others.
Peridermium Pini and Aecidium elatinum also cause cankers under certain conditions, as also does Gymnosporangium, but in these cases the fungi are more truly parasitic.
In some cases—e.g. Ash, Pine, Olives—bacteria are concerned as associated organisms in the cankering of trees.
Burrs or Knauers are irregular excrescences, principally woody, with gnarled and warted surfaces. They are frequently due to some previous injury, such as the crushing or grazing of cortical tissues by cart-wheels. The excitation of the tissues thus wounded results in the development of shoots from adventitious or dormant buds at the base of old tree trunks, or in the starting of the same process where a branch has been broken off. The new bud begins to develop a shoot, but soon dies at its tip owing to paucity of food-supplies to the weak shoot, while new buds at its base repeat the process next year with the same result, and each of these again in turn, and so on. The consequence is an extremely complex nest of buds, all capable of growing in thickness and putting on wood to some extent, but not of growing out in length. In course of time this mass may attain dimensions measurable by feet, forming huge rounded and extremely hard-knotted burrs, the cross-section of which shows the vascular tissues running irregularly in all directions, and, owing to the very slow growth, extremely dense and hard. The dark spots in such sections—e.g. Bird's-eye Maple—are the cut bud-axes all fused together, as it were. On old Elms such burrs are common at heights on the stem which preclude the assumption of any coarse mechanical injury, and similar structures occur on the boles of other forest trees suddenly exposed to light by the felling of their companions, which suggests that these epicormic shoots result from some disturbance due to the action of light.
Witches' Brooms are irregular tufts of twigs often found among the branches of trees such as Birches, Hornbeam, etc., where they look like crows' nests, and similar structures are to be found on Silver Firs and other conifers. In the former case they are due to Exoascus, in the latter to Aecidium, fungi which are perennially parasitic in the shoots, and stimulate the twiggy development of a number of buds which would normally have remained in abeyance, or not have been formed at all, and only do so now in a fashion different from that of normal branches.
Rosette-like formations, depending on similar disturbing causes on the part of insects, occur in conifers—e.g. Gastropacha Pini.
Dense tufts of twiggy shoots may be developed on many trees by pruning in such a way as to stimulate the shooting out of basal buds which would otherwise remain dormant, e.g. Elm, Ash, and thus it occurs that injuries such as frost, insect bites, etc., may induce the production of such tufts in a tree crown. The dense nests of stool-shoots thrown up from felled tree-stumps are of essentially the same nature—partly adventitious and partly dormant buds being enabled to grow out because they can now be supplied with materials previously carried beyond them while the trunk was still there. Suckers, if repeatedly cut down, may also behave similarly.
Wood-nodules or Sphaeroblasts are curious marble-like masses of wood which protrude with a covering of bark from old trunks of Beeches, etc., and can be readily dug out with a knife. The nodule has arisen by the slow growth of the cambium of a dormant bud, the base of which separated at an early date from the wood beneath; the cambium then closed in over the base and laid on thickening rings all round the axis of the bud except at the extreme apex. When the separation occurred the cambium of the wood beneath covered over the previous point of junction, and thus the woody bud was pushed out with the bark, and now protrudes covered with a thin layer of the latter. Similar nodules are occasionally found on Apple trees.
Notes to Chapter XXIV.
For further information on Cankers the student should read Marshall Ward, Timber and some of its Diseases, Chapter X. Further, the discussion as to the causes of canker in Frank, Krankheiten der Pflanzen, B. I., p. 207, and B. III., pp. 167 and 172, and various papers in Zeitschrift für Pflanzen-krankheiten.
