Reading bark

On a walk without leaves you learn trees by their bark, and it turns out that is easier than the leaf books make it seem.

• Birch everybody knows. But the paper birch and the downy birch peel differently; downy stays more matte, with dark horizontal dashes.
• Aspen is smooth and greenish-grey, with diamond-shaped scars where old branches were. It looks like it has been polished.
• Larch is thick, deeply fissured, reddish-brown in the cracks. Older trees look like dried mud.
• Rowan is smooth, grey, with long lenticels like stretched commas.
• Alder near water: dark, almost purple-grey, with little cones still hanging from last year.

The trick is to touch it. Bark that photographs the same often feels completely different.