Newton Seed Bank - working on larch
The images are courtesy of Mike Phillips, Newton, who worked at Newton Research Station in Forest Genetics from 1954 until his retirement. Mike was involved in the early work to improve the quality of some of Britain’s most important forest trees and was in at the pioneering stage of grafting cloned stock and controlled pollination experiments.
The image shows Mike Phillips and Alan Mitchell loading up a test tube with collected pollen to be used in cross pollination work. John Keenleyside, Forres, remembers Alan Mitchell well and says that he was the project leader tasked to work up systems to provide more secure supplies of high quality Hybrid larch and other larch species for the FC and nursery trade. It seems larch was quite a difficult species to work with as it flowered so early in the year, around March, and at that time the weather conditions were usually quite wet and consequently proved very difficult indeed to collect dry pollen.
The attached PDF shows several pictures the first of which in Mike Phillips and Alan Mitchell working on a grafted larch with Head Forester Jim Thomson (hands on knees) looking on. The next image is a paper by John Matthews, head of the tree improvement project describing the early days of setting up a system to provide high quality Hybrid larch seed for the tree nursery trade. The image following shows pollen collecting vessels, pollen storage tube and a couple of pollen guns and finally two images show the old arch way into the former farm steading, above which was the pigeon loft used in the early days as the pollen extractory workshop.
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