The Native British Trees
A native British tree is most often defined as one that managed to colonize mainland Britain after the end of the last Ice Age (about ten thousand years ago) and before the waters rose cutting off these islands from the continental mainland (probably about three thousand years later). So you would think, wouldn’t you, that by now people would have had enough time to agree on a definitive list, but, predictably, it’s not that simple. Not only are the early years lost in a murk of confusion (did the beech manage to claw its way on to these shores at the last minute – or were its nuts paddled across many years later by Stone Age hunters?), but there has also been much recent rearrangement of the species and subspecies and an agonized debate over what constitutes a hybrid. And there’s even a question mark hanging over what we mean by ‘native’. Perhaps we should include anything that made its way here without being handled by a human? For all we know, a bird may have brought the seed of the first spindle, many years after the English Channel was formed. And what, come to think of it, is a tree anyway? There are plenty of people who would include the purging buckthorn in our list of trees; others place it firmly as a large shrub. Dogwood, too – and… a difficult one, this… what about the elder?
Anyway, here’s a list of large (they can reach at least five metres), perennial, woody plants with a branching crown (supported by a primary stem), which are most likely to have arrived in mainland Britain before it became an island. There are twenty-six of them, although you may well wonder why I have separated the aspen (Populus tremula) from the black poplar (Populus nigra) and what all those sorbuses are doing on their own; or indeed what the elder is doing here at all, when the spindle (Euonymus europaeus) is left languishing as a shrub. There are five evergreens (the box, holly, juniper, the Scots pine and the yew) and the rest are broadleaves. Not a larch or a sitka spruce in sight…
The fact is I wanted there to be twenty-six native British trees. That was the number I was told long ago, and it seems pleasing that there are the same number of British trees as there are letters in the alphabet. This also ties in neatly with what we know of the Early Irish language, ogham, whose twenty (later twenty-five) letters were once believed to have been ascribed to (or inspired by) different species of tree or shrub. You can read an especially baroque celebration of this theory in Robert Graves’s ‘The White Goddess’, and in particular in his reimagining of the medieval Welsh poem ‘The Battle of the Trees’, although he later claimed he’d become unhinged through overwork and dismissed the whole thing.
The field guide I use is the brilliant Collins Complete Guide to British Trees by Paul Sterry.
- alder (Alnus glutinosa)
- ash (Fraxinus excelsior)
- aspen (Populus tremula)
- birch: silver (Betula pendula); downy (Betula pubescens)
- beech (Fagus sylvatica)
- black poplar (Populus nigra)
- blackthorn (Prunus spinosa)
- box (Buxus sempervirens)
- cherry: wild (Prunus avium); bird (Prunus padus)
- crab apple (Malus sylvestris)
- elder (Sambucus nigra)
- elm: smooth-leaved elm (Ulmus minor); wych elm (Ulmus glabra)
- hawthorn: common (Crataegus monogyna); midland (Crataegus laevigata)
- hazel (Corylus avellana)
- hornbeam (Carpinus betulus)
- holly (Ilex aquifolium)
- juniper (Juniperus communis)
- lime: small-leaved (Tilia cordata); large-leaved (Tilia platyphyllos)
- maple (Acer campestre)
- oak: pedunculate or English (Quercus robur); sessile (Quercus petraea)
- rowan (Sorbus aucuparia)
- Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris)
- whitebeam (Sorbus aria)
- wild service tree (Sorbus torminalis)
- willow: bay (Salix pentandra); crack (Salix fragilis); white (Salix alba); almond-leaved (Salix triandra)
- yew (Taxus baccata)
