Britaian's sexiest tree
The ash is lazy, the oak is mighty. But it’s the graceful, smooth-limbed beech that is...
TrEES are my favourite things in nature, I think. Certainly I’d place them above people. When you think about it, they are superior to us in very many ways. they live longer, are better looking, even when 100 years old, and have been around for longer — 120 million years.
they put out fresh new foliage every spring and the baby green haze that steals through the woods is a thrilling sight, particularly on a sunny morning. Yet, how many of us can identify the trees we admire, beyond one or two such as the distinctive weeping willow and silver birch?
Will Cohu’s armchair guide to trees, first published several years ago, differs from other guides in its extreme informality. No Latin names. No specialist tree lingo, such as pinnate or pedunculate.
He rambles the woods with us like a chatty companion, introducing his old friends with lots of gossipy stories. It is winter so you can see the trees’ shape properly. We start by getting out of the car in a lay-by disfigured with rubbish and with a whiff of bacon sandwiches from a snack van flying the Union flag.
Anonymous thin trees like small electricity pylons, dangling little cones and catkins, line the lay-by. they are alders, thirsty trees that commonly grow alongside ditches and rivers.
their wood was once used to make clogs for Lancashire mill girls. Among them grows hazel ‘like an umbrella stand full of walking sticks that cannot decide whether it is a tree or a bush’. You see the man’s cunning? He assumes our total ignorance and entertains us as he teaches.
the great English oak, for instance, sprawling sideways not upwards, develops tremendous strength from the strain of simply keeping so much weight aloft.
AND this made the oak ideal for shipbuilding, its crooked wood being just the right shape for sailing ships’ keels. In Elizabethan times it took 2,000 oak trees to build a man o’ war and they worried about running out of oak. Sometimes Cohu’s gift for picturesque description goes too far in my opinion, as when calling the noble beech ‘a lad’s mag of a tree’ because it bares so much sleekly smooth limb, even when 200 years old.
Beeches are truly feminine but too graceful with it to be compared to a vulgar stripper — even though their wood is used to make high heels. We ramble on, recognising the regal ash, which is too lazy to wake up with other trees in spring, merely putting out little clumps of purple broccoli on its bare twigs. Meanwhile, the explosive sycamore shows its vigour by bursting out into a great cauliflower.
We learn the difference between the horse chestnut, of elephantine shape with bark like a baked potato’s skin, and the more ancient sweet, or Spanish, chestnut, whose deep-ridged spiral bark seems to be screwing it into the ground.
Also he shows us how to differentiate between the three types of cedar: pagodashaped, flat-topped cedar of Lebanon; upward bristling Atlas cedar; and Himalayan cedar, or deodar, with its downward branches and drooping, dangling
fronds. I grew up among those and can vouch for the pleasure of their sweet, musky smell.
The good name of conifer was spoiled by the Forestry Commission, which covered acre upon acre of Highland because it can be turned quickly into cheap timber or newsprint.
It has spiny foliage like barbed wire and nothing can grow underneath it. Sitka was first shipped back to Britain by a remarkable Scottish botanist and dendrologist, David Douglas (dendrol-ogy is the study of trees, not rhododendrons).
He saw its commercial potential for the poor soil of his native Highlands. Douglas toured the Pacific North West with Billy his Scottish terrier, living with native peoples, wearing his dirtiest clothes and carrying his few belongings on his back.
He died in Hawaii in 1834 and the Douglas fir is named after him.
This fir became a favourite of Victorians with its pendant boughs and soft upswept needles that smell of grapefruit.
Douglas firs grow taller even than Scots pines, with one having been recorded as reaching 400 ft.
SeQUOIAS, or redwoods (aka Wellingtonias) also grow to preposterous heights — 300 ft plus. Their massive trunks are covered in thick reddish bark that is so spongy you can punch it hard without hurting your fist, as I used to do to surprise my children.
The oldest redwoods go back the farthest of all — fossils have been found from 100 million years ago or more.
Our oldest tree, in the sense of longest lived, is, of course, the yew. Some of those in our churchyards are reckoned to be more than 1,000 years old.
Leaving the woods, our companion points out exotic specimens in park-land such as the ginkgo and catalpa. He also talks about trees that thrive alongside city streets, from the great London plane to the ubiquitous and ever-so-boring whitebeam.
He delights in the many types of cherry that used to grace suburban front gardens — that now all too often grow nothing more interesting than Vauxhalls and Toyotas.
Yes, I liked this book. I even tried answering the quizzes that end each chapter, and discovered that I had learnt quite a lot.