Mast (botany) Mast seeding is defined as the highly variable production of fruit by a population. These intermittent pulses of food resources drive ecosystem-level functions and forest dynamics. The difference between a mast seeding year and a non-mast seeding year can be thousands of acorns, hickory nuts, beech nuts, etc. Mast seeding dominantly occurs in wind-pollinated tree species, but has also been observed in grasses and Dipterocarps. Masting, in the strict sense of the term, occurs only in monocarpic (or semelparous) species, whose members reproduce only once during their lifetime, then die. Hypothesis for the evolution of mast seeding can broadly be
The Poem Tree the 20-line poem into the tree over two weeks in the summer. Taking a ladder and a tent to the beech tree, Tubb carved the poem into the tree from memory, regularly forgetting to take the original copy with him. Sources vary as to whether the carving took place in 1844 or between 1844 and 1845. The poem was inspired by Tubb's fondness of the surrounding landscape, which is described in the first half of the first stanza. It has been suggested that the poem, which is also a summary of the location's history, was an example of Tubb's repressed