Saturday 30 April 2022 The Guardian •
43adding to the wood’s spectral
qualities. The branches are clothed
in a soft, verdant covering of
epiphytic mosses and hanging
lichens. It truly is an amazing place.
One legend tells of the wood being
home to large black “ wisht hounds”
that had blood-red eyes and huge
fangs and roamed the moors on
misty nights looking for unwary
travellers, led by the devil, or the
Old Crockern, an ancient spirit
living on the moor on Crockern Tor.
- Kingley Vale , West Sussex
The second is this forest made up
predominately of yew, but with
ash, hawthorn, holly and oak.
Sadly, many of the ash trees have
been infected with ash dieback
( Hymenoscyphus fraxineus ) and
most are unlikely to survive.
It is the yew trees that fascinate
visitors most, with their twisting
branches, snaking out from the
parent trunk, reaching down to
the ground and creating arches
and alley ways, which you have to
scramble through to reach cave-
and cathedral-like spaces. The
branches that reach the ground,
layer themselves, producing new
roots and re growing as siblings
around their parent, increasing the
forest’s spread.
These are known as walking
trees and I love the thought of
young trees being able to slowly
walk f arther and f arther from their
parent, exploring and extending
their range by continually rooting
the lower outstretched limbs. This
is something you will only see in
a natural yew forest where the
trees can develop without human
intervention, unlike the equally
amazing huge ancient yews of the
churchyards with all their lower
limbs removed to about head
height and above for access. - Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire
Home to Europe’s longest lime
tree avenue, planted in 1840. It is
a lmost 2 miles long and has 1,296
common limes ( Tilia x europaea )
planted along what is also the
longest double avenue of lime trees
in Europe. The avenue was closed
for a time during the second world
war when it was used as open-air
storage for munitions in hundreds
of corrugated iron stores. The road
between the limes re opened in 1955.
Surprisingly, the black bands
that can still be clearly seen on
each of the trunks along the avenue
were from bands of grease painted
on them in 1906 when the trees
were found to be under attack from
insects. The grease bands were to
prevent the female winter moths
climbing up them and laying their
eggs in the canopies. Similarly,
white bands painted on street lime
trees to help them be seen during
the black outs of the second world
war can often still be seen today. - Avenue of Giants, Argyll
At Dunoon in Argyll, Scotland,
entering the Benmore Botanic
Garden you are welcomed by the
Avenue of Giants, dramatic lines of
giant redwoods ( Sequoiadendron
giganteum ). Twenty pairs were
planted in 1863 by the American
owner of the Benmore estate,
James Piers Patrick. These giants
are now nearly 170 years old. They
stand at more than 50 metres and
have girths ranging from 5 m to 7 m.
They are among the oldest and
tallest redwoods in Europe.- Lapsed pollards and coppice
The life of a tree can be extended
by coppicing and pollarding ,
traditional, ancient methods of
woodland management that take
advantage of the natural process by
which trees grow. And it is through
these practices of continually
cutting back species that some of
our oldest trees survive. Coppice
is cut back to almost ground level,
while pollards are cut back to the
main trunk of a tree, but at varying
heights, usually about head height.
This was done to prevent livestock
grazing the new regrowth.
Many of the ancient pollarded
and coppiced trees in forests today
have not been managed for wood
production for many decades and
are known as lapsed pollards and
coppice. These trees, although
visually stunning, are diffi cult to
manage, with branch attachments
that become stressed due to their
weight held above often decaying,
hollow trunks. They are, however,
home to many invertebrates that
can only survive on the decaying
wood they produce, and nesting
birds and sheltering bats that make
use of the hollows.
Coppicing has had a resurgence
in popularity as is a sustainable
management method of woodland
and woodland materials. I hope it
will continue to grow in popularity.
Great Trees of Britain and Ireland
by Tony Hall (£25) is published by
Kew on 5 May. The author is head
of temperate collections at Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew1 Last week scientists
discovered an unusual
new species of deep-sea
jellyfi sh. What makes it
so diff erent?
A It has no tentacles
B It has an orb-shaped head
C It survives below the ocean
twilight zone2 How many times did
Thames Water dump
raw sewage into rivers
in 2021?A 3,205
B 5,028
C 2383 To combat the climate
crisis, what is the new
minimum air conditioning
temperature in public
buildings in Italy?A 30C
B 25C
C 28C4 New analysis suggests
Northern Ireland’s farmers
will need to have how
many fewer sheep and
cows in order to meet
net zero targets?A 3 million
B 1 million
C 0.5 million5 According to a recent
US study, how is climate
change likely to aff ect
the size of bees?A No change
B Larger bees are likely to thrive
C The number of small- bodied
bees will increaseSolutions1, A. 2, B. 3, B. 4, B. 5, C.Quiz by Patrick Greenfi eld
Environment
Test your
knowledge
A yew tree
with spreading
branches in
Kingley Vale
forest; centre
left, the Crouch
oak has become
an isolated
street tree on
the outskirts
of Addlestone,Surrey; centre
right, the many
stems of a
lapsed beech
coppice; below,
the mysterious
sycamore – or is
it sycamores? –
at the National
Trust’s Saltram
House, Devon▼ Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor,
Devon, where the branches of dwarf
oak trees are covered in epiphytic
mosses and hanging lichens