Textured Tree Bark, Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, UK Royalty-Free Stock Photography

Textured Tree Bark, Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, UK Imagine for a moment you are wearing X-ray glasses and you can look just below the surface of a tree’s trunk. Here we see a layer of living tissue. Zooming in really close, this tissue is like a bundle of straws packed together. What we are seeing is the tree’s plumbing, conductive ‘pipes’ for transporting fluids. This tissue comes in two main forms. The first layer we see is the phloem. Phloem is right below the surface bark and carries sugars from the leaves down to the rest of the tree. Further in is more ‘plumbing’ called the xylem or sapwood. These tubes carry water and minerals the opposite way, up to the leaves. Sandwiched between these two layers is the cambium. The cambium’s job is to produce cells. On the inside, it creates more xylem and on the outside, it creates more phloem.