Native Trees

[Scarlet Pimpernel]

Hi Everyone,

Just how many truely native species of tree are there in Britain? Is there a list....by tree I mean 'bushes' and 'shrubs' too such as Blackthorn etc... Are there native apple and pear tree's too...for example the Cox Apple etc. I am looking to try see and grow a sample of every kind of native tree from seed if I can. Currently have Cox Apple, Sessile Oak and Hawthorn coming along well. Does anybody know anything about growing Yew or Spindle and are these two native?

Cheers Jacob

[aeshna5]

Without going through a book I couldn't tell you how many species there are; there's a fair number of rare microspecies of trees such as whitebeams. There are rare pears such as Plymouth Pear + Crab Apple is native. I do know there are 3 native conifers: Scot's Pine, Yew + Juniper. Spindle is also a native of the chalk.

[Cotham Marble]

Originally Posted by Scarlet Pimpernel

Hi Everyone,

Just how many truely native species of tree are there in Britain? Is there a list....by tree I mean 'bushes' and 'shrubs' too such as Blackthorn etc... Are there native apple and pear tree's too...for example the Cox Apple etc. I am looking to try see and grow a sample of every kind of native tree from seed if I can. Currently have Cox Apple, Sessile Oak and Hawthorn coming along well. Does anybody know anything about growing Yew or Spindle and are these two native?

Cheers Jacob

It very much depends upon how you define 'native'. Do you set a date, say 10,000 BCE after which you consider everything is an import ? Or are species introduced up to the Roman period now native, but mediaeval introductions are to be considered exotics ?

Oliver Rackham's 1976 book Trees & Woodland in the British Landscape is still probably the most accessible discussion of how British woodland developed, my suggestion is to read Rackham and then draw up your own list.

CM

[Buzzy]

Originally Posted by Scarlet Pimpernel

Hi Everyone,

Just how many truely native species of tree are there in Britain? Is there a list....by tree I mean 'bushes' and 'shrubs' too such as Blackthorn etc... Are there native apple and pear tree's too...for example the Cox Apple etc. I am looking to try see and grow a sample of every kind of native tree from seed if I can. Currently have Cox Apple, Sessile Oak and Hawthorn coming along well. Does anybody know anything about growing Yew or Spindle and are these two native?

Cheers Jacob

Hi Jacob
I thought I'd give you a few words and their accepted meanings

True native - A plant that has been in the country for at least 10,000 years

Native - A plant arrived in the country by natural dispersion and has been in the country for at least 2000 years

Naturalised plant - A foriegn plant introduced by man as a garden plant or ornamental etc. that has escaped into the area and now flourish. ie. Indian balsam and Sycamore.

Alien plant - A foriegn plant introduced from one country to another, not yet naturalised.

I hope this can help you in your search for true natives. It takes a while to go through the lists of what is true native and what is just native. Hope you have fun finding out.
Buzz

[JennyS]

I hope this can help you in your search for true natives. It takes a while to go through the lists of what is true native and what is just native. Hope you have fun finding out.

And then you hit the next hiccup - the species might be native, but the individual tree you're looking at could have been planted, but not necessarily from native (UK seed) stock as there are a lot of continental nursery imports of 'native' trees ........

[aeshna5]

Originally Posted by Buzzy

Hi Jacob
I thought I'd give you a few words and their accepted meanings

True native - A plant that has been in the country for at least 10,000 years

Native - A plant arrived in the country by natural dispersion and has been in the country for at least 2000 years

Naturalised plant - A foriegn plant introduced by man as a garden plant or ornamental etc. that has escaped into the area and now flourish. ie. Indian balsam and Sycamore.

Alien plant - A foriegn plant introduced from one country to another, not yet naturalised.

I hope this can help you in your search for true natives. It takes a while to go through the lists of what is true native and what is just native. Hope you have fun finding out.
Buzz

An alien plant is an alien plant! Even if fully naturalised such as the 2 examples you cite, they are still alien species!

[Cotham Marble]

Originally Posted by Buzzy

Hi Jacob
I thought I'd give you a few words and their accepted meanings

True native - A plant that has been in the country for at least 10,000 years

Native - A plant arrived in the country by natural dispersion and has been in the country for at least 2000 years

Naturalised plant - A foriegn plant introduced by man as a garden plant or ornamental etc. that has escaped into the area and now flourish. ie. Indian balsam and Sycamore.

Alien plant - A foriegn plant introduced from one country to another, not yet naturalised.

I hope this can help you in your search for true natives. It takes a while to go through the lists of what is true native and what is just native. Hope you have fun finding out.
Buzz

Buzz,
Have you any source for the reasoning/authority behind this categorisation ? It may (apart from the Alien category) be a wholly logical way of sorting plants - but at face value I can't see why it has any special merit.

CM

[Frimsley]

I think the 10,000 year mark is questionable, and 10,000 BCE certainly so. The latter would make for a very short list.

There doesn't seem to be a generally accepted notion of what constitutes 'native'. A definition I was once given was any plant surviving the last ice age or arriving before the cutting off of the British Isles from mainland Europe. There wasn't a lot here as the ice started retreating, around 11,000 years ago. Any cut off point earlier than separation from Europe seems arbitary to me, and that's about 8,000 years ago I believe.

An alternative is plants that survived the last ice age or made their way to Britain by natural means following it. This includes all of those in the first definition, but will add some more recent arrivals that weren't helped here by man, carried by the sea, strong winds or birds for example.

There is also the question of native to what? Scots pine is native to the Caledonian Forest, but not to Dorset. Similarly, Beech is only really native in the more southern parts of the country.

The exact number of native trees depends not only on your definition of native, but also on where you draw the line between species. Several 'species' of whitebeam that are native are arguably merely subspecies. But the number is probably somewhere between about 35 and 50.

There is (or was) a collection of native woody plants in one part of Westonbirt Arboretum, Silkwood, a bit to the left as you come through Waste Gate from memory.

[Paul mabbott]

Originally Posted by Frimsley

..........There is also the question of native to what? Scots pine is native to the Caledonian Forest, but not to Dorset. Similarly, Beech is only really native in the more southern parts of the country.

.........

Yes, most people would use the formation of the Channel/Manche when the British fauna became isolated from the rest of NW Europe but, as you say, many species (particularly ones with windborne seeds) can establish by perfectly natural means (it is in the nature of island biogeography that species are lost and species are gained - a natural process). There is also how you prove that something was established two thousand or more years ago? The pollen record is not foolproof.

I'd take issue that Pinus sylvestris is not native to the rest of the island - it is a species which has shifted north as natural succession with climate warming but much of its absence from England is that it did not fit in with the coppicing/pollarding management favoured by southern woodsmen!

I therefore think that arguments about 'native' and 'non-native' are often spurious: our plants are just one subset of the greater list of temperate NW Europe. Within our sub-set, there are further sub-sets relating to latitude, altitude, geology &c ....

[Peter W]

A list of British plants and their status (where available) can be downloaded from the BSBI website:

Database

The second file on this page (List 2007, 534kb) contains the status information. It is a tab delimited text file using % characters to separate data items and to display it in column format it needs to be imported into Excel and saved as a .xls spreadsheet.

Having achieved this it is a fairly simple operation to sort it by status in order to group all the native species together.