Browsing: oaks

As a child, I was intrigued when I found perfectly round balls under the trees in the woods that I wandered through. Sometimes they were smooth and red-speckled. Other times they were brown and wrinkled. They looked like what I imagined a brain might appear to be without a skull, so brain balls they became. I had no clue how they came to be. But these galls are only part of a larger story about the insects that cause them to form on oaks.