Tree talk

7 June 2008

Jeremy Clarke on his Low Life

All my life I’ve tried to acquaint myself with trees by learning which ones are which, but the task seems beyond me. Wouldn’t it be praiseworthy, for example, to be able to recognise the 32 native species of broad-leafed tree — willow, oak, lime, ash, wych elm, and so forth — and the three conifer species — juniper, Scots pine and yew — that were growing here 7,000 years ago when the ice melted and Britain became an island. But when I go out with a field guide, I can hardly differentiate between a tree and a shrub, let alone between one species of tree and the next.

There are 1,500 species of tree in Britain today, says my field guide. Of these I might recognise a conker tree in the autumn and a eucalyptus at any time of the year — the latter because we’ve got one in our garden. Last year Uncle Les, an elderly Australian relative, came to stay. He’s a retired farmer. When I took him outside to show him round the garden, he said, ‘You’ve got a gum tree!’

‘Isn’t it lovely,’ I said.

He spat. ‘Dirty tree,’ he said, reproving it as though it were a dog or a child. And the old settler was right. It looks graceful, but the mess it makes by shedding bark, leaves and small branches has to be seen to be believed.

Les asked lots of questions about our trees and was flabbergasted at how little we knew. ‘That’s a pretty tree,’ he’d say. ‘What d’you call that?’ We’d all stand there scratching our heads. ‘You don’t know much about your own bloody country, do you?’ he’d say. Right again. Here in our coastal retirement village, most of us know more about knife crime in south London than we do about trees.

When Les returned down under, I was shamed enough to book a place on a guided Sunday afternoon walk led by a local tree expert. The walk was entitled ‘Trees for health’; its purpose to teach us how to identify different species, and which parts of them are worth harvesting for food and medicine.

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