26-03-2004, 01:12 AM
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English ivy in need of shade and water in the desert
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from (paghat) contains these words:
In article , Janet Baraclough..
wrote:
The message m
from "Cereus-validus" contains these words:
Almost everything that presently grows in England is an "exotic"
because the
natives had completely decimated the forests and wiped out the original
native flora ages ago.
Garbage.
Janet, Scotland.
It was certainly too sweeping a statement to be less than silly, but I
gather the best lumber forests in the UK are today Douglas fir forests
from here in the Pacific Northwest, completely naturalized & vastly too
large & swift-growing & overshadowing for native trees to survive with the
Douglas.
You're mistaken. The "lumber forests" in Britain are purpose planted,
usually on otherwise treeless hillside. They are predominantly sitka
spruce although Douglas fir is also grown. They were mainly planted post
ww2, so as they mature for harvest they are shrinking. Those commercial
forests are separate from, and don't impinge on, our native woodlands
and there isn't a problem with naturalised Douglas firs killing out
native woodland.
And many forests that were completely eradicated through the past
600 years have had restoration within the last 125 years, but largely of
foreign species that at best approximated the originals.
There are plenty of ancient surviving woodlands, far older than 600
years; try a websearch on the Caledonian Forest.
This certainly
HAD to change the dynamics of the forest floor, pollinator-behavior &
survival, when the giant plants in an ecosystem are completely changed,
very little that is smaller is going to stay the same.
Or the English Bluebell that two centuries ago was famed for its
overpowering scent of balsam & cinnamon is today completely scentless
completely untrue
from
having become thoroughly hybridized with the always-scentless Spanish
squill, so that a pure native scilla with its former redolence is
apparently extinct.
That is mistaken. Yes, there are recent concerns about hybridisation
with the Spanish bluebell,(a garden escape) but there are still
thousands of wild places far from the curse of where the pure English
form is undiluted and as powerfully scented as ever.
Same with hedge hawthorn, today so hybridized with
species from all over the northern hemisphere that whatever the purely
native English hawthorn was like two or three centuries ago is no longer
quite known.
Try looking up the age of the Glastonbury Thorn :-)
It may be hard for Americans to imagine this, but there are countless
ancient native trees all over the UK, whose individual location and the
role they played in history has been recorded for many, many hundreds of
years. Trees used as property markers were recorded in the Domesday book
in 1086. Far earlier than that, many were protected for their religious
significance (particularly, hawthorns and yew). In other words, there's
no problem identifying the DNA of ancient native British species. We've
either got a living example, or we've got buildings, furniture etc made
from their wood, (and dated) for matching purposes. There are scores if
not hundreds of forestry and wildflower nurseries which supply stock
with DNA-proven native provenance.
I read an article about English forest-edge ecosystems which
once had a wide array of native shrubs that are today dominated by
century-old Pontus rhododendrons.
Rhododendron ponticum is indeed a pest, but only in a limited habitat
niche in parts of the wetter, milder acid-soil west of the UK. Not in
the drier colder east, or limestone areas etc. Even in
ponticum-territory, not all woodlands are affected. Native forest-edge
and forest-understory still thrives in all parts of britain.
It's the same story as all over the world, except the UK is so much more
finite for being islands, so that like other island ecosystems it was
always more at risk.
The only thing wrong with that is the mistaken premise that Britain
has lost its ancient flora and ecology; that isn't the case.
And with a continous culture so much older than in
North America, that means the UK has had a millenia head-start on screwing
everything up.
Until a few hundred years ago, our ancient culture was hugely
interdependent on our native ecology; we couldn't afford to screw it up.
We have a millenia headstart on studying and recording it, and knowing
where everything is, which is enormously useful to botanists and
ecologists. Try Oliver Rackham's books.
I'm simply astonished that two Americans who have a deep interest in
botany and ecology, should both have the extraordinarily inaccurate
impression that British native wild flora and ancient ecosystems are a
thing of the past, dead and gone. Far from it.
Janet.
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