A new species. Possibly not the first this year as I've managed to identify a few mosses and liverworts, but I was reminded of the blog by one of my erstwhile readers whilst we perambulated Box Hill in Surrey and nudged into action.
Box Hill is famous for, and named after, the Box, Buxus sempervirens, which grows in profusion on its flanks. It is just north or Dorking and part of the North Downs chalk ridge. From it we could clearly make out Chanctonbury Ring on the South Downs.
Box seems to behave a bit like yew. The seedlings develop in areas of deep shade and, presumably because of its evergreen nature, can continue growing before the deciduous canopy gets the upper hand. The canopy here is mostly beech. There is also plenty of yew around.
Box is a smelly plant. It is slow growing, producing very hard wood which is especially valued by wood-engravers who carve into the end-grain of blocks formed from it. It is perhaps most familiar to people as a plant of topiary and parterres, leading many to think it must have been introduced. It is, however, a stalwart native with many places named after it. e.g. Bexhill, Bexley, Box Hill, Bix and Bixley.
Here it is at last, one of the greatest organisms in the land: English Oak, Pedunculate Oak; Quercus robur. (Curiously it is also known as French Oak!) The term pedunculate comes from the fact that the acorns are borne on stalks, unlike the other native oak, Q. petraea, on which they grow attached directly to the twig (giving rise to its common name of Sessile Oak.)
There are lots of species in the genus Quercus, but this is the type species. It is one of our longest lived plants. The UK has an unusually high number of ancient oaks compared with other European countries. One of the highlights of my natural history peregrinations was being shown around the ancient oaks of Staverton Park by the late, great Prof Oliver Rackham.
An ancient oak can support more insects than any other plant, with more than 400 recorded.
Our oaks are in a bit of trouble from diseases such as Phytophthera and Acute Oak Decline. Prof Rackham was also of the opinion that oaks had stopped self-seeding successfully in woodlands, although whether this was due to deer or disease he wasn't sure.
The oldest trees have all been pollarded. Some are more than a 1000 years old. Old trees often look to be dying but in fact remain alive for hundreds or years. In such states they are at their ecological peak.
This poor tree was nearly dead on the slopes beneath the Fishermen's Bastion in Budapest. It is desperately flowering again despite being in fruit.
Aesculus hippocastanum is from round these parts, relatively speaking: the Caucasian Mountains. Its natural habitat is the sides of gorges or cliffs. I prefer to call it a conker tree.
This is Spindle, Euonymus europaeus, growing in secondary woodland above the Danube in Budapest. (Very nice thank you. I can recommend it.)
It has very hard wood which made it great for making spindles. Turner was the first to call it a Spindle tree but borrowed from the Dutch. The flowers and fruit are much more spectacular than these photos suggest. I clearly remember the first time I came across it on the edge of a ride in some ancient woodland near where we were living in Sussex back in 2007; it was so garish I concluded that it couldn't possibly be native. I was shocked when I discovered I was wrong.
As Katy and I wandered the more salubrious streets of Richmond waiting for our daughters to return from camp, this Ginko biloba caught my eye.
It is a freak survivor of a division of the plant kingdom known as the Ginkophyta which arose over 270 million years ago. Its closest relatives are the cycads, other 'living fossils' found mostly in the southern hemisphere. Both have motile sperm (as do the mosses, ferns and algae) which are structurally very similar. Ginkos are dioecious, meaning plants are either male or female.
The Maidenhair tree is the only species surviving in the entire division/class/order/family/genus. It was confined in the wild to central China but has been part of human culture for thousands of years.
It is used medicinally and as a food plant, but is also a popular specimen tree due to its peculiar growth habit and good autumn colours. In fact only yesterday Abbey and I were talking about getting one for the garden.
One couldn't go to London and not blog about the London Plane tree, Platanus x acerifolia. It is the quintessential urban tree, tolerating high levels of pollution and root compaction. It grows to prodigious heights and casts a dappled shade. Its bark when younger than the veteran in this picture flakes into a mosaic of light greens and greys.
It's thought to be a hybrid between P. occidentalis, the American Sycamore, and P. orientalis, the Oriental Plane, but no one seems entirely sure!
This is unusual. It's a mature elm tree, which is noteworthy in this era of Dutch elm disease, but it also has an strange growth habit; the trunk is seen on the right and the tree is growing along a bent bole towards the left of the picture.
Elms are unusual in another way. Despite producing prodigious keys (seeds) (see right hand photo) they only rarely germinate. Consequently reproduction is largely vegetative by a process known a suckering. This leads to the formation of clones, with genetically identical trees growing in close proximity. It also makes taxonomy a nightmare, a bit like it is with dandelions and brambles.
In the past each village had its 'own' elm trees, subtly different from those in the village down the road. There is an excellent chapter on elms in Rackham's (god rest his soul) book The History of the Countryside. In the introduction he says "They are the most complex and difficult trees in western Europe, and the most intimately linked to human affairs. Oak and hazel have played at least as great a part in shaping civilization, but have not themselves been shaped by civilization as have elms."
People, even people living around Brighton and Eastbourne, believe that all mature elm trees were wiped out during the Dutch Elm disease massacre of the 1960s and 70s. In fact the radical actions of the local authorities in these districts, felling and burning affected trees at the first whiff of trouble, has preserved the English elms. The commonest tree in central Brighton is the English elm!
This specimen is growing in Jevington churchyard. My wife commented on it's unusual shape and I got (over) excited about it being an elm. I'm guessing it is likely to be a weeping elm, Ulmus glabra 'Camperdownii', which will have been created from the original tree discovered in the Camperdown estate near Dundee. It is not an English elm, but a cultivar of wych elm.
Another quick post limited to what I have photographed in the last few days on the phone: our apricot tree growing on a south-west facing wall. They're very early flowering so frost is always a worry. This is Prunus armeniaca 'Hargrand/Torinel', which we bought from Agroforestry research back in 2007. We've not had many apricots from it, but the ones we have had have been enormous and delicious. Although this one is self-fertilising it would be better if we had another tree nearby. It's certainly more successful than the almonds we bought at the same time.
The name derives from the fact that they are believed to have been introduced into western Europe from Armenia.
Salix caprea is also known as the pussy willow because of its furry catkins or pussies.
Willows are dioecious and this one is a female with grey pussies.
It also provides equine services as a scratching post.
This was growing on Chailey Common and is quite a mature specimen.
Grey willow (S. cinerea) is very similar but a key distinguishing feature is that if you peel the bark of a two-year old twig and run your fingernail around the wood you can feel ridges, whereas goat willow is smooth.
I remember this by thinking of a smooth old goat. Why old goats might be so described is utterly irrelevant.
