Janet Baraclough.. expounded:

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).

It's not hard for this American to imagine it, I've seen it. One of
my fondest memories of my trip to southwestern England was my early AM
walk through the New Forest (forgive me, but I think it was somewhere
near Tourquay. Being England, of course, the forest was anything but
new, it was ancient, the feeling I got while walking through there I
doubt I'll ever experience again. Then (my memory is going) I was a a
Norman abbey, outside of which was an 1100 year old yew that was
hollow in the middle. They kept it short over the centuries by using
the branches for arrows. The age of things I saw over there awed me.
And I also saw plenty of native plants between the gardens we visited.
Seemed a pretty complete ecosystem to me!

--
Ann, Gardening in zone 6a
Just south of Boston, MA
********************************

Janet Baraclough.. expounded:

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).

It's not hard for this American to imagine it, I've seen it. One of
my fondest memories of my trip to southwestern England was my early AM
walk through the New Forest (forgive me, but I think it was somewhere
near Tourquay. Being England, of course, the forest was anything but
new, it was ancient, the feeling I got while walking through there I
doubt I'll ever experience again. Then (my memory is going) I was a a
Norman abbey, outside of which was an 1100 year old yew that was
hollow in the middle. They kept it short over the centuries by using
the branches for arrows. The age of things I saw over there awed me.
And I also saw plenty of native plants between the gardens we visited.
Seemed a pretty complete ecosystem to me!

--
Ann, Gardening in zone 6a
Just south of Boston, MA
********************************

Janet Baraclough.. expounded:

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).

It's not hard for this American to imagine it, I've seen it. One of
my fondest memories of my trip to southwestern England was my early AM
walk through the New Forest (forgive me, but I think it was somewhere
near Tourquay. Being England, of course, the forest was anything but
new, it was ancient, the feeling I got while walking through there I
doubt I'll ever experience again. Then (my memory is going) I was a a
Norman abbey, outside of which was an 1100 year old yew that was
hollow in the middle. They kept it short over the centuries by using
the branches for arrows. The age of things I saw over there awed me.
And I also saw plenty of native plants between the gardens we visited.
Seemed a pretty complete ecosystem to me!

--
Ann, Gardening in zone 6a
Just south of Boston, MA
********************************

Oh yes, I forgot.

Its garbage too!!!!

Just because it happened many years before you were born, Janet, that
doesn't mean it didn't happen.


"Janet Baraclough.." wrote in message
...
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.

Oh yes, I forgot.

Its garbage too!!!!

Just because it happened many years before you were born, Janet, that
doesn't mean it didn't happen.


"Janet Baraclough.." wrote in message
...
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.

Oh yes, I forgot.

Its garbage too!!!!

Just because it happened many years before you were born, Janet, that
doesn't mean it didn't happen.


"Janet Baraclough.." wrote in message
...
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.

In article , Janet Baraclough..
wrote:

The message
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.

As I recently read a great deal on Douglas firs & a biography of David
Douglas himself, I assure you they've been in the UK vastly longer than
you seem in your comment allows, & the thing about the Douglas is it will
NOT remain in a production forest, which even if it did, production
forests themselves displace actual complex ecosystems. The tree is after
all named for a Scot, & David Douglas, who died in 1834, lived to see his
own trees big enough for harvests. His trees like ones planted in New
Zealand following his UK example quickly naturalized, because that's what
they're great at doing. Douglas did also plant the Sitka Spruce, so unless
his ghost did that post-WWII, you're off by well over a century.

What really happened post-WWII is the already decimated ancient forests
were cut down entirely. More of them than not. In twenty years all the
damage that had been done in five centuries before was exceeded. And it is
only quite recently that "back from the brink" projects have saved some
little bits of what little remains, & replanted what was long removed,
whereever possible.

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.

The Great Caledonian was so nearly destroyed that it became known as "the
remnant pine forest." Tim Clifford of the Caledonian Partnership said the
good fate of the Caledonian wasn't assured until the present decade, &
still requires good watchdogs. An assessment only five years ago was that
the Caledonian was "very far removed from the romantic ideal," the Native
Pinewoods Scheme having only begun in 1989 and not falling swiftly behind
the curve for its whole first decade before the Caledonian Partnership and
Trees for Life were formed. The modern attempt to restore its former
biodiversity is laudable to extreme, & nice that some old things weren't
taken in a very few central parts, but being forested since ancient times
is even so not what you are taking it mean. The Caledonian Forest's MODERN
restoration is an in-progress bit of heroism, but even if it weren't
nearly lost, given that the lifespan of a Caledonian pine is 200 to 350
years, & the Caledonian's birches are vastly younger than that, your "far
older than 600 years" doesn't wash. The RECORD age of any living
Caledonian pine is 550 years from a remote glen -- far older than they
would ordinarily live, but still shy of your "far older than 600 years"
even for the rare exceptions -- though compared to what England boasts,
Scottish trees are up there in age. On the other hand we must not mistake
the phrase "Ancient forest" for "Ancient trees," but more importantly,
don't mistake "Anent trees" for "biodiversity." One old Yew in a
churchyard is not a healthy ecosystem by itself, & the fact the Great
Caeldonian has very little in it older than a century -- a few of the
oldest a scant 300 years -- is not the measure of its health. It sounds
like its biodiversity is being restored in vast stretches of the new Great
Caledonian, & that's a great deal more important than any pretences of the
trees themselves being ancient -- health & old age are not necessarily the
same thing.

Then again, the reason it is important to identify the oldest Caledonians
is so they can be cloned. The Scottish pine is a subspecies, but only the
oldest ones are not hybridized! Less than 100 old Caledonians have been
identified as pure stock (amidst which is the one gauged to be 550 years
old, two centuries longer than their expected lifespans, & the real hope
for the survival of the subspecies, because Alan Fletcher trained a group
of advocates with the Forestry Commission to produce young replicas from
this old genetic stock -- the "merely" 200 year old trees being all
genetically polluted. So the only reason the TRULY native species isn't
doomed to extinction in the near future is because of modern cloning
techniques & the survival of 100 trees older than the expected lifespan in
an obscure glen. Such heroic efforts are NOT being made for everything, &
what I outlined remains largely true -- even in places where biodiversity
exists, truly NATIVE species are being displaced by invaders or hybridized
with introduced species -- so much so that even pure Caledonian pines
appear to have fallen down to 100 in number -- even in your "ancient"
forest where one would have expected an exception to such a rule.

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.

If it is not yet universally true, & there are some out of out of the wy
places, say, in Wales, where the redolence of scilla still fills the air,
then great. Ban the Spanish the hybridization is final & complete then!
But the anishing scent is written about in MANY articles; protected
expanses of bluebells in Sheffield are reportedly hybrids without scent, &
no less than the UK Wildlife Trust has sent out the alarm about few if any
English Bluebells being pure English Bluebells.

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 trust you put the Glastonbury Thorn in front of a smily emoticon because
you well knew it was already a big tourist fraud before Cromwell cut it
down, & it became doubly a fraud when it was afterword pretended to have
been magically resurged. British legends are wonderful things. They're not
comparable to DNA. But if we are to accept myths for science, then
according to the same myth of the Thorn's extravagant old age, it never
was a native species ever but was brought by sea from afar, so if it
really had lived for 2000 years and seeded all of Glastonberry, then
there's an invasive non-native problem for ya! Seems every ten miles
there's a church boasting the oldest tree in the UK in its churchyard,
often something like an oak that is incapable of living so long, & the
most "credible" of these many-centuries or millenia-old trees are at best
the great-great-great descendant of the trees their caretakers pretend
them to be. Such legends are lovely & to be encouraged, though completely
unrelated to science & ecology & the continuance of a diverse ecosystem.
When one looks for scientifically accredited ages, they shrink
dramatically, but even myth-makers can claim without cracking a smile that
the oldest tree in England is a 300 year old plane tree (I've hugged trees
three times that age right here in my county), while the ones pretending
to be much older rely on records of how long certain stories of them were
told rather than on how many rings they have.

Happily some trees in Scotland really are old even if the English ones are
frauds, & I'm betting more than a few Scots are glad to know it. The
oldest tree in Scotland, the Fortingill Yew, was pretended by generations
of caretakers to be 5,000 years old. It's not, of course. But how jolly
the Forestry Commission COULD show it was decently old, if sickly, at
1,760 years -- (since it was dated, the church has reportedly taken to
saying it is "only" 3,000 years old since the 5,000 year date was
disproven; strange they still can't bare the truth, that the Forestry
Commission was being pro-tourism to permit any age to it at all, it's
really just a young thing growing out of the dead grandparent, & it was
the dead tree that could be dated to 1,760 years. If any ancient forests
REALLY remained in England, these kinds of fibs, exaggerations, & reliance
on mythology where science fails, wouldn't be essential. I only have to go
for a walk to find trees older than the oldest ones that are tourist
treats in your beloved isles -- but it may not always be so, as our
president only this past week changed a few regulations so that more of
the Olympic rainforest could be cut down -- the youngest of those trees
being two or three centuries, & the ones that the lumberjacks are going to
get are over a thousand). But even if King John's Oak hadn't been a fraud,
even if the Glastonbury Thorn hadn't been two times dead in modern
history, even if the yew pretending to be 'the oldest living tree on
earth' weren't but a young tree growing from a dead one -- even if the
legends of ancientness weren't in the main all fables, such random old
survivors would not an ecosystem make.

Closer to reality is the history of Aster Wood which vanished slowly from
the Victorian era to the 1940s, when the very last of it was clearcut for
firewood. It's now an expanse of bushes at least, & a few trees coming
back, though not far from it is an entirely new woods that is supposed to
look pretty old though nothing in it is older than about 50 years.

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.

You seem not to to be taking into consideration how that ecosystems are
finite. If something takes over "the wetter, milder acid-soil west of the
UK" then native plants that required that environment did not magically
travel to the drier colder east & survive. The drier east has entirely
different invasives whic have displaced entirely different native plants,
or hybridized with them so that truly distinct races of plants disappear.
Similarly, the fact that one or two ancient forests belonging to Kings
were preserved exclusively for Kings to hunt in is very nice for those
forests, but they too are finite ecosystems, do not represent all the
species that grew north & south, east & west, & are have a lord's plenty
of species from three continents invading them.

Even in
ponticum-territory, not all woodlands are affected. Native forest-edge
and forest-understory still thrives in all parts of britain.

I hope you're right, but you seem to have a glowy impression of things
which your Wildlife Trust does not always share.

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.

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.

Well, all I can say is that it is English writers who have published
articles about the loss of the scent in the English Bluebell -- if it's
untrue in some places that is good (too bad it remains untrue of any
cultivated ones), but it's a well-documented & often written-of problem
always presented as a tragedy. And as you didn't know how long the Douglas
& Sitka firs have been in the UK, with the Douglas in particular
naturalized apart from production forests & in no location, production or
otherwise, permitting a native ecosystem co-exist with it, then I'm not
100% certain you know more about it than your own complaining ecologists.
If your best examples are a hawthorn that is only a tourist myth in age, &
the lovely Caledonian only now BEGINNING to be repopulated due to heroic
efforts to recover the native subspecies, well, my parallel to your
astonishment would be "I'm simply astonished that a Scot wouldn't know the
Caledonian pine came within 100 trees of not existing as a separate
subspecies." Except I'm not astonished; practically at my own back door
thousand-years-old firs are being removed from "protected" lands because
the President said it was okay, & if any gardener on my street knows about
that, it's because I informed them.

For the UK though, the lists of still-endangered UK species is long enough
that your insistance that it isn't true is just flat-out wishful thinking
-- but whether that really indicates a larger percentage of the overall
flora is gone than in most other places I wouldn't want to swear is true,
only that your rose-tinted glasses are causing you to miss a few bits of
reality. In the USA we're losing more species every year, and our gardens
are hybridizing with the forests just as avidly as began in the UK at
least 500 years sooner than here, & many of our commonest weeds are from
Europe or Central Asia. So I wouldn't pretend a better condition here --
but your rose colored glasses for the UK seem to be blinding!

-paggers

Janet.





--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

In article , Janet Baraclough..
wrote:

The message
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.

As I recently read a great deal on Douglas firs & a biography of David
Douglas himself, I assure you they've been in the UK vastly longer than
you seem in your comment allows, & the thing about the Douglas is it will
NOT remain in a production forest, which even if it did, production
forests themselves displace actual complex ecosystems. The tree is after
all named for a Scot, & David Douglas, who died in 1834, lived to see his
own trees big enough for harvests. His trees like ones planted in New
Zealand following his UK example quickly naturalized, because that's what
they're great at doing. Douglas did also plant the Sitka Spruce, so unless
his ghost did that post-WWII, you're off by well over a century.

What really happened post-WWII is the already decimated ancient forests
were cut down entirely. More of them than not. In twenty years all the
damage that had been done in five centuries before was exceeded. And it is
only quite recently that "back from the brink" projects have saved some
little bits of what little remains, & replanted what was long removed,
whereever possible.

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.

The Great Caledonian was so nearly destroyed that it became known as "the
remnant pine forest." Tim Clifford of the Caledonian Partnership said the
good fate of the Caledonian wasn't assured until the present decade, &
still requires good watchdogs. An assessment only five years ago was that
the Caledonian was "very far removed from the romantic ideal," the Native
Pinewoods Scheme having only begun in 1989 and not falling swiftly behind
the curve for its whole first decade before the Caledonian Partnership and
Trees for Life were formed. The modern attempt to restore its former
biodiversity is laudable to extreme, & nice that some old things weren't
taken in a very few central parts, but being forested since ancient times
is even so not what you are taking it mean. The Caledonian Forest's MODERN
restoration is an in-progress bit of heroism, but even if it weren't
nearly lost, given that the lifespan of a Caledonian pine is 200 to 350
years, & the Caledonian's birches are vastly younger than that, your "far
older than 600 years" doesn't wash. The RECORD age of any living
Caledonian pine is 550 years from a remote glen -- far older than they
would ordinarily live, but still shy of your "far older than 600 years"
even for the rare exceptions -- though compared to what England boasts,
Scottish trees are up there in age. On the other hand we must not mistake
the phrase "Ancient forest" for "Ancient trees," but more importantly,
don't mistake "Anent trees" for "biodiversity." One old Yew in a
churchyard is not a healthy ecosystem by itself, & the fact the Great
Caeldonian has very little in it older than a century -- a few of the
oldest a scant 300 years -- is not the measure of its health. It sounds
like its biodiversity is being restored in vast stretches of the new Great
Caledonian, & that's a great deal more important than any pretences of the
trees themselves being ancient -- health & old age are not necessarily the
same thing.

Then again, the reason it is important to identify the oldest Caledonians
is so they can be cloned. The Scottish pine is a subspecies, but only the
oldest ones are not hybridized! Less than 100 old Caledonians have been
identified as pure stock (amidst which is the one gauged to be 550 years
old, two centuries longer than their expected lifespans, & the real hope
for the survival of the subspecies, because Alan Fletcher trained a group
of advocates with the Forestry Commission to produce young replicas from
this old genetic stock -- the "merely" 200 year old trees being all
genetically polluted. So the only reason the TRULY native species isn't
doomed to extinction in the near future is because of modern cloning
techniques & the survival of 100 trees older than the expected lifespan in
an obscure glen. Such heroic efforts are NOT being made for everything, &
what I outlined remains largely true -- even in places where biodiversity
exists, truly NATIVE species are being displaced by invaders or hybridized
with introduced species -- so much so that even pure Caledonian pines
appear to have fallen down to 100 in number -- even in your "ancient"
forest where one would have expected an exception to such a rule.

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.

If it is not yet universally true, & there are some out of out of the wy
places, say, in Wales, where the redolence of scilla still fills the air,
then great. Ban the Spanish the hybridization is final & complete then!
But the anishing scent is written about in MANY articles; protected
expanses of bluebells in Sheffield are reportedly hybrids without scent, &
no less than the UK Wildlife Trust has sent out the alarm about few if any
English Bluebells being pure English Bluebells.

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 trust you put the Glastonbury Thorn in front of a smily emoticon because
you well knew it was already a big tourist fraud before Cromwell cut it
down, & it became doubly a fraud when it was afterword pretended to have
been magically resurged. British legends are wonderful things. They're not
comparable to DNA. But if we are to accept myths for science, then
according to the same myth of the Thorn's extravagant old age, it never
was a native species ever but was brought by sea from afar, so if it
really had lived for 2000 years and seeded all of Glastonberry, then
there's an invasive non-native problem for ya! Seems every ten miles
there's a church boasting the oldest tree in the UK in its churchyard,
often something like an oak that is incapable of living so long, & the
most "credible" of these many-centuries or millenia-old trees are at best
the great-great-great descendant of the trees their caretakers pretend
them to be. Such legends are lovely & to be encouraged, though completely
unrelated to science & ecology & the continuance of a diverse ecosystem.
When one looks for scientifically accredited ages, they shrink
dramatically, but even myth-makers can claim without cracking a smile that
the oldest tree in England is a 300 year old plane tree (I've hugged trees
three times that age right here in my county), while the ones pretending
to be much older rely on records of how long certain stories of them were
told rather than on how many rings they have.

Happily some trees in Scotland really are old even if the English ones are
frauds, & I'm betting more than a few Scots are glad to know it. The
oldest tree in Scotland, the Fortingill Yew, was pretended by generations
of caretakers to be 5,000 years old. It's not, of course. But how jolly
the Forestry Commission COULD show it was decently old, if sickly, at
1,760 years -- (since it was dated, the church has reportedly taken to
saying it is "only" 3,000 years old since the 5,000 year date was
disproven; strange they still can't bare the truth, that the Forestry
Commission was being pro-tourism to permit any age to it at all, it's
really just a young thing growing out of the dead grandparent, & it was
the dead tree that could be dated to 1,760 years. If any ancient forests
REALLY remained in England, these kinds of fibs, exaggerations, & reliance
on mythology where science fails, wouldn't be essential. I only have to go
for a walk to find trees older than the oldest ones that are tourist
treats in your beloved isles -- but it may not always be so, as our
president only this past week changed a few regulations so that more of
the Olympic rainforest could be cut down -- the youngest of those trees
being two or three centuries, & the ones that the lumberjacks are going to
get are over a thousand). But even if King John's Oak hadn't been a fraud,
even if the Glastonbury Thorn hadn't been two times dead in modern
history, even if the yew pretending to be 'the oldest living tree on
earth' weren't but a young tree growing from a dead one -- even if the
legends of ancientness weren't in the main all fables, such random old
survivors would not an ecosystem make.

Closer to reality is the history of Aster Wood which vanished slowly from
the Victorian era to the 1940s, when the very last of it was clearcut for
firewood. It's now an expanse of bushes at least, & a few trees coming
back, though not far from it is an entirely new woods that is supposed to
look pretty old though nothing in it is older than about 50 years.

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.

You seem not to to be taking into consideration how that ecosystems are
finite. If something takes over "the wetter, milder acid-soil west of the
UK" then native plants that required that environment did not magically
travel to the drier colder east & survive. The drier east has entirely
different invasives whic have displaced entirely different native plants,
or hybridized with them so that truly distinct races of plants disappear.
Similarly, the fact that one or two ancient forests belonging to Kings
were preserved exclusively for Kings to hunt in is very nice for those
forests, but they too are finite ecosystems, do not represent all the
species that grew north & south, east & west, & are have a lord's plenty
of species from three continents invading them.

Even in
ponticum-territory, not all woodlands are affected. Native forest-edge
and forest-understory still thrives in all parts of britain.

I hope you're right, but you seem to have a glowy impression of things
which your Wildlife Trust does not always share.

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.

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.

Well, all I can say is that it is English writers who have published
articles about the loss of the scent in the English Bluebell -- if it's
untrue in some places that is good (too bad it remains untrue of any
cultivated ones), but it's a well-documented & often written-of problem
always presented as a tragedy. And as you didn't know how long the Douglas
& Sitka firs have been in the UK, with the Douglas in particular
naturalized apart from production forests & in no location, production or
otherwise, permitting a native ecosystem co-exist with it, then I'm not
100% certain you know more about it than your own complaining ecologists.
If your best examples are a hawthorn that is only a tourist myth in age, &
the lovely Caledonian only now BEGINNING to be repopulated due to heroic
efforts to recover the native subspecies, well, my parallel to your
astonishment would be "I'm simply astonished that a Scot wouldn't know the
Caledonian pine came within 100 trees of not existing as a separate
subspecies." Except I'm not astonished; practically at my own back door
thousand-years-old firs are being removed from "protected" lands because
the President said it was okay, & if any gardener on my street knows about
that, it's because I informed them.

For the UK though, the lists of still-endangered UK species is long enough
that your insistance that it isn't true is just flat-out wishful thinking
-- but whether that really indicates a larger percentage of the overall
flora is gone than in most other places I wouldn't want to swear is true,
only that your rose-tinted glasses are causing you to miss a few bits of
reality. In the USA we're losing more species every year, and our gardens
are hybridizing with the forests just as avidly as began in the UK at
least 500 years sooner than here, & many of our commonest weeds are from
Europe or Central Asia. So I wouldn't pretend a better condition here --
but your rose colored glasses for the UK seem to be blinding!

-paggers

Janet.





--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

In article , Janet Baraclough..
wrote:

The message
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.

As I recently read a great deal on Douglas firs & a biography of David
Douglas himself, I assure you they've been in the UK vastly longer than
you seem in your comment allows, & the thing about the Douglas is it will
NOT remain in a production forest, which even if it did, production
forests themselves displace actual complex ecosystems. The tree is after
all named for a Scot, & David Douglas, who died in 1834, lived to see his
own trees big enough for harvests. His trees like ones planted in New
Zealand following his UK example quickly naturalized, because that's what
they're great at doing. Douglas did also plant the Sitka Spruce, so unless
his ghost did that post-WWII, you're off by well over a century.

What really happened post-WWII is the already decimated ancient forests
were cut down entirely. More of them than not. In twenty years all the
damage that had been done in five centuries before was exceeded. And it is
only quite recently that "back from the brink" projects have saved some
little bits of what little remains, & replanted what was long removed,
whereever possible.

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.

The Great Caledonian was so nearly destroyed that it became known as "the
remnant pine forest." Tim Clifford of the Caledonian Partnership said the
good fate of the Caledonian wasn't assured until the present decade, &
still requires good watchdogs. An assessment only five years ago was that
the Caledonian was "very far removed from the romantic ideal," the Native
Pinewoods Scheme having only begun in 1989 and not falling swiftly behind
the curve for its whole first decade before the Caledonian Partnership and
Trees for Life were formed. The modern attempt to restore its former
biodiversity is laudable to extreme, & nice that some old things weren't
taken in a very few central parts, but being forested since ancient times
is even so not what you are taking it mean. The Caledonian Forest's MODERN
restoration is an in-progress bit of heroism, but even if it weren't
nearly lost, given that the lifespan of a Caledonian pine is 200 to 350
years, & the Caledonian's birches are vastly younger than that, your "far
older than 600 years" doesn't wash. The RECORD age of any living
Caledonian pine is 550 years from a remote glen -- far older than they
would ordinarily live, but still shy of your "far older than 600 years"
even for the rare exceptions -- though compared to what England boasts,
Scottish trees are up there in age. On the other hand we must not mistake
the phrase "Ancient forest" for "Ancient trees," but more importantly,
don't mistake "Anent trees" for "biodiversity." One old Yew in a
churchyard is not a healthy ecosystem by itself, & the fact the Great
Caeldonian has very little in it older than a century -- a few of the
oldest a scant 300 years -- is not the measure of its health. It sounds
like its biodiversity is being restored in vast stretches of the new Great
Caledonian, & that's a great deal more important than any pretences of the
trees themselves being ancient -- health & old age are not necessarily the
same thing.

Then again, the reason it is important to identify the oldest Caledonians
is so they can be cloned. The Scottish pine is a subspecies, but only the
oldest ones are not hybridized! Less than 100 old Caledonians have been
identified as pure stock (amidst which is the one gauged to be 550 years
old, two centuries longer than their expected lifespans, & the real hope
for the survival of the subspecies, because Alan Fletcher trained a group
of advocates with the Forestry Commission to produce young replicas from
this old genetic stock -- the "merely" 200 year old trees being all
genetically polluted. So the only reason the TRULY native species isn't
doomed to extinction in the near future is because of modern cloning
techniques & the survival of 100 trees older than the expected lifespan in
an obscure glen. Such heroic efforts are NOT being made for everything, &
what I outlined remains largely true -- even in places where biodiversity
exists, truly NATIVE species are being displaced by invaders or hybridized
with introduced species -- so much so that even pure Caledonian pines
appear to have fallen down to 100 in number -- even in your "ancient"
forest where one would have expected an exception to such a rule.

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.

If it is not yet universally true, & there are some out of out of the wy
places, say, in Wales, where the redolence of scilla still fills the air,
then great. Ban the Spanish the hybridization is final & complete then!
But the anishing scent is written about in MANY articles; protected
expanses of bluebells in Sheffield are reportedly hybrids without scent, &
no less than the UK Wildlife Trust has sent out the alarm about few if any
English Bluebells being pure English Bluebells.

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 trust you put the Glastonbury Thorn in front of a smily emoticon because
you well knew it was already a big tourist fraud before Cromwell cut it
down, & it became doubly a fraud when it was afterword pretended to have
been magically resurged. British legends are wonderful things. They're not
comparable to DNA. But if we are to accept myths for science, then
according to the same myth of the Thorn's extravagant old age, it never
was a native species ever but was brought by sea from afar, so if it
really had lived for 2000 years and seeded all of Glastonberry, then
there's an invasive non-native problem for ya! Seems every ten miles
there's a church boasting the oldest tree in the UK in its churchyard,
often something like an oak that is incapable of living so long, & the
most "credible" of these many-centuries or millenia-old trees are at best
the great-great-great descendant of the trees their caretakers pretend
them to be. Such legends are lovely & to be encouraged, though completely
unrelated to science & ecology & the continuance of a diverse ecosystem.
When one looks for scientifically accredited ages, they shrink
dramatically, but even myth-makers can claim without cracking a smile that
the oldest tree in England is a 300 year old plane tree (I've hugged trees
three times that age right here in my county), while the ones pretending
to be much older rely on records of how long certain stories of them were
told rather than on how many rings they have.

Happily some trees in Scotland really are old even if the English ones are
frauds, & I'm betting more than a few Scots are glad to know it. The
oldest tree in Scotland, the Fortingill Yew, was pretended by generations
of caretakers to be 5,000 years old. It's not, of course. But how jolly
the Forestry Commission COULD show it was decently old, if sickly, at
1,760 years -- (since it was dated, the church has reportedly taken to
saying it is "only" 3,000 years old since the 5,000 year date was
disproven; strange they still can't bare the truth, that the Forestry
Commission was being pro-tourism to permit any age to it at all, it's
really just a young thing growing out of the dead grandparent, & it was
the dead tree that could be dated to 1,760 years. If any ancient forests
REALLY remained in England, these kinds of fibs, exaggerations, & reliance
on mythology where science fails, wouldn't be essential. I only have to go
for a walk to find trees older than the oldest ones that are tourist
treats in your beloved isles -- but it may not always be so, as our
president only this past week changed a few regulations so that more of
the Olympic rainforest could be cut down -- the youngest of those trees
being two or three centuries, & the ones that the lumberjacks are going to
get are over a thousand). But even if King John's Oak hadn't been a fraud,
even if the Glastonbury Thorn hadn't been two times dead in modern
history, even if the yew pretending to be 'the oldest living tree on
earth' weren't but a young tree growing from a dead one -- even if the
legends of ancientness weren't in the main all fables, such random old
survivors would not an ecosystem make.

Closer to reality is the history of Aster Wood which vanished slowly from
the Victorian era to the 1940s, when the very last of it was clearcut for
firewood. It's now an expanse of bushes at least, & a few trees coming
back, though not far from it is an entirely new woods that is supposed to
look pretty old though nothing in it is older than about 50 years.

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.

You seem not to to be taking into consideration how that ecosystems are
finite. If something takes over "the wetter, milder acid-soil west of the
UK" then native plants that required that environment did not magically
travel to the drier colder east & survive. The drier east has entirely
different invasives whic have displaced entirely different native plants,
or hybridized with them so that truly distinct races of plants disappear.
Similarly, the fact that one or two ancient forests belonging to Kings
were preserved exclusively for Kings to hunt in is very nice for those
forests, but they too are finite ecosystems, do not represent all the
species that grew north & south, east & west, & are have a lord's plenty
of species from three continents invading them.

Even in
ponticum-territory, not all woodlands are affected. Native forest-edge
and forest-understory still thrives in all parts of britain.

I hope you're right, but you seem to have a glowy impression of things
which your Wildlife Trust does not always share.

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.

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.

Well, all I can say is that it is English writers who have published
articles about the loss of the scent in the English Bluebell -- if it's
untrue in some places that is good (too bad it remains untrue of any
cultivated ones), but it's a well-documented & often written-of problem
always presented as a tragedy. And as you didn't know how long the Douglas
& Sitka firs have been in the UK, with the Douglas in particular
naturalized apart from production forests & in no location, production or
otherwise, permitting a native ecosystem co-exist with it, then I'm not
100% certain you know more about it than your own complaining ecologists.
If your best examples are a hawthorn that is only a tourist myth in age, &
the lovely Caledonian only now BEGINNING to be repopulated due to heroic
efforts to recover the native subspecies, well, my parallel to your
astonishment would be "I'm simply astonished that a Scot wouldn't know the
Caledonian pine came within 100 trees of not existing as a separate
subspecies." Except I'm not astonished; practically at my own back door
thousand-years-old firs are being removed from "protected" lands because
the President said it was okay, & if any gardener on my street knows about
that, it's because I informed them.

For the UK though, the lists of still-endangered UK species is long enough
that your insistance that it isn't true is just flat-out wishful thinking
-- but whether that really indicates a larger percentage of the overall
flora is gone than in most other places I wouldn't want to swear is true,
only that your rose-tinted glasses are causing you to miss a few bits of
reality. In the USA we're losing more species every year, and our gardens
are hybridizing with the forests just as avidly as began in the UK at
least 500 years sooner than here, & many of our commonest weeds are from
Europe or Central Asia. So I wouldn't pretend a better condition here --
but your rose colored glasses for the UK seem to be blinding!

-paggers

Janet.





--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

A quick search revealed that there are a still a few remaining species of
flowering plants endemic to the British islands and nowhere else but most if
not all of them are on the verge of extinction by being overrun by
introduced weedy species and destruction of habitat.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/science/projects/fff/ChekEnds.htm

Note that Sedum anglicum is not on the list because despite the species
epithet, it was originally introduced from Scandinavia long ago.


"paghat" wrote in message
news
In article , Janet Baraclough..
wrote:

The message
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.

As I recently read a great deal on Douglas firs & a biography of David
Douglas himself, I assure you they've been in the UK vastly longer than
you seem in your comment allows, & the thing about the Douglas is it will
NOT remain in a production forest, which even if it did, production
forests themselves displace actual complex ecosystems. The tree is after
all named for a Scot, & David Douglas, who died in 1834, lived to see his
own trees big enough for harvests. His trees like ones planted in New
Zealand following his UK example quickly naturalized, because that's what
they're great at doing. Douglas did also plant the Sitka Spruce, so unless
his ghost did that post-WWII, you're off by well over a century.

What really happened post-WWII is the already decimated ancient forests
were cut down entirely. More of them than not. In twenty years all the
damage that had been done in five centuries before was exceeded. And it is
only quite recently that "back from the brink" projects have saved some
little bits of what little remains, & replanted what was long removed,
whereever possible.

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.

The Great Caledonian was so nearly destroyed that it became known as "the
remnant pine forest." Tim Clifford of the Caledonian Partnership said the
good fate of the Caledonian wasn't assured until the present decade, &
still requires good watchdogs. An assessment only five years ago was that
the Caledonian was "very far removed from the romantic ideal," the Native
Pinewoods Scheme having only begun in 1989 and not falling swiftly behind
the curve for its whole first decade before the Caledonian Partnership and
Trees for Life were formed. The modern attempt to restore its former
biodiversity is laudable to extreme, & nice that some old things weren't
taken in a very few central parts, but being forested since ancient times
is even so not what you are taking it mean. The Caledonian Forest's MODERN
restoration is an in-progress bit of heroism, but even if it weren't
nearly lost, given that the lifespan of a Caledonian pine is 200 to 350
years, & the Caledonian's birches are vastly younger than that, your "far
older than 600 years" doesn't wash. The RECORD age of any living
Caledonian pine is 550 years from a remote glen -- far older than they
would ordinarily live, but still shy of your "far older than 600 years"
even for the rare exceptions -- though compared to what England boasts,
Scottish trees are up there in age. On the other hand we must not mistake
the phrase "Ancient forest" for "Ancient trees," but more importantly,
don't mistake "Anent trees" for "biodiversity." One old Yew in a
churchyard is not a healthy ecosystem by itself, & the fact the Great
Caeldonian has very little in it older than a century -- a few of the
oldest a scant 300 years -- is not the measure of its health. It sounds
like its biodiversity is being restored in vast stretches of the new Great
Caledonian, & that's a great deal more important than any pretences of the
trees themselves being ancient -- health & old age are not necessarily the
same thing.

Then again, the reason it is important to identify the oldest Caledonians
is so they can be cloned. The Scottish pine is a subspecies, but only the
oldest ones are not hybridized! Less than 100 old Caledonians have been
identified as pure stock (amidst which is the one gauged to be 550 years
old, two centuries longer than their expected lifespans, & the real hope
for the survival of the subspecies, because Alan Fletcher trained a group
of advocates with the Forestry Commission to produce young replicas from
this old genetic stock -- the "merely" 200 year old trees being all
genetically polluted. So the only reason the TRULY native species isn't
doomed to extinction in the near future is because of modern cloning
techniques & the survival of 100 trees older than the expected lifespan in
an obscure glen. Such heroic efforts are NOT being made for everything, &
what I outlined remains largely true -- even in places where biodiversity
exists, truly NATIVE species are being displaced by invaders or hybridized
with introduced species -- so much so that even pure Caledonian pines
appear to have fallen down to 100 in number -- even in your "ancient"
forest where one would have expected an exception to such a rule.

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.

If it is not yet universally true, & there are some out of out of the wy
places, say, in Wales, where the redolence of scilla still fills the air,
then great. Ban the Spanish the hybridization is final & complete then!
But the anishing scent is written about in MANY articles; protected
expanses of bluebells in Sheffield are reportedly hybrids without scent, &
no less than the UK Wildlife Trust has sent out the alarm about few if any
English Bluebells being pure English Bluebells.

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 trust you put the Glastonbury Thorn in front of a smily emoticon because
you well knew it was already a big tourist fraud before Cromwell cut it
down, & it became doubly a fraud when it was afterword pretended to have
been magically resurged. British legends are wonderful things. They're not
comparable to DNA. But if we are to accept myths for science, then
according to the same myth of the Thorn's extravagant old age, it never
was a native species ever but was brought by sea from afar, so if it
really had lived for 2000 years and seeded all of Glastonberry, then
there's an invasive non-native problem for ya! Seems every ten miles
there's a church boasting the oldest tree in the UK in its churchyard,
often something like an oak that is incapable of living so long, & the
most "credible" of these many-centuries or millenia-old trees are at best
the great-great-great descendant of the trees their caretakers pretend
them to be. Such legends are lovely & to be encouraged, though completely
unrelated to science & ecology & the continuance of a diverse ecosystem.
When one looks for scientifically accredited ages, they shrink
dramatically, but even myth-makers can claim without cracking a smile that
the oldest tree in England is a 300 year old plane tree (I've hugged trees
three times that age right here in my county), while the ones pretending
to be much older rely on records of how long certain stories of them were
told rather than on how many rings they have.

Happily some trees in Scotland really are old even if the English ones are
frauds, & I'm betting more than a few Scots are glad to know it. The
oldest tree in Scotland, the Fortingill Yew, was pretended by generations
of caretakers to be 5,000 years old. It's not, of course. But how jolly
the Forestry Commission COULD show it was decently old, if sickly, at
1,760 years -- (since it was dated, the church has reportedly taken to
saying it is "only" 3,000 years old since the 5,000 year date was
disproven; strange they still can't bare the truth, that the Forestry
Commission was being pro-tourism to permit any age to it at all, it's
really just a young thing growing out of the dead grandparent, & it was
the dead tree that could be dated to 1,760 years. If any ancient forests
REALLY remained in England, these kinds of fibs, exaggerations, & reliance
on mythology where science fails, wouldn't be essential. I only have to go
for a walk to find trees older than the oldest ones that are tourist
treats in your beloved isles -- but it may not always be so, as our
president only this past week changed a few regulations so that more of
the Olympic rainforest could be cut down -- the youngest of those trees
being two or three centuries, & the ones that the lumberjacks are going to
get are over a thousand). But even if King John's Oak hadn't been a fraud,
even if the Glastonbury Thorn hadn't been two times dead in modern
history, even if the yew pretending to be 'the oldest living tree on
earth' weren't but a young tree growing from a dead one -- even if the
legends of ancientness weren't in the main all fables, such random old
survivors would not an ecosystem make.

Closer to reality is the history of Aster Wood which vanished slowly from
the Victorian era to the 1940s, when the very last of it was clearcut for
firewood. It's now an expanse of bushes at least, & a few trees coming
back, though not far from it is an entirely new woods that is supposed to
look pretty old though nothing in it is older than about 50 years.

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.

You seem not to to be taking into consideration how that ecosystems are
finite. If something takes over "the wetter, milder acid-soil west of the
UK" then native plants that required that environment did not magically
travel to the drier colder east & survive. The drier east has entirely
different invasives whic have displaced entirely different native plants,
or hybridized with them so that truly distinct races of plants disappear.
Similarly, the fact that one or two ancient forests belonging to Kings
were preserved exclusively for Kings to hunt in is very nice for those
forests, but they too are finite ecosystems, do not represent all the
species that grew north & south, east & west, & are have a lord's plenty
of species from three continents invading them.

Even in
ponticum-territory, not all woodlands are affected. Native forest-edge
and forest-understory still thrives in all parts of britain.

I hope you're right, but you seem to have a glowy impression of things
which your Wildlife Trust does not always share.

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.

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.

Well, all I can say is that it is English writers who have published
articles about the loss of the scent in the English Bluebell -- if it's
untrue in some places that is good (too bad it remains untrue of any
cultivated ones), but it's a well-documented & often written-of problem
always presented as a tragedy. And as you didn't know how long the Douglas
& Sitka firs have been in the UK, with the Douglas in particular
naturalized apart from production forests & in no location, production or
otherwise, permitting a native ecosystem co-exist with it, then I'm not
100% certain you know more about it than your own complaining ecologists.
If your best examples are a hawthorn that is only a tourist myth in age, &
the lovely Caledonian only now BEGINNING to be repopulated due to heroic
efforts to recover the native subspecies, well, my parallel to your
astonishment would be "I'm simply astonished that a Scot wouldn't know the
Caledonian pine came within 100 trees of not existing as a separate
subspecies." Except I'm not astonished; practically at my own back door
thousand-years-old firs are being removed from "protected" lands because
the President said it was okay, & if any gardener on my street knows about
that, it's because I informed them.

For the UK though, the lists of still-endangered UK species is long enough
that your insistance that it isn't true is just flat-out wishful thinking
-- but whether that really indicates a larger percentage of the overall
flora is gone than in most other places I wouldn't want to swear is true,
only that your rose-tinted glasses are causing you to miss a few bits of
reality. In the USA we're losing more species every year, and our gardens
are hybridizing with the forests just as avidly as began in the UK at
least 500 years sooner than here, & many of our commonest weeds are from
Europe or Central Asia. So I wouldn't pretend a better condition here --
but your rose colored glasses for the UK seem to be blinding!

-paggers

Janet.





--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

A quick search revealed that there are a still a few remaining species of
flowering plants endemic to the British islands and nowhere else but most if
not all of them are on the verge of extinction by being overrun by
introduced weedy species and destruction of habitat.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/science/projects/fff/ChekEnds.htm

Note that Sedum anglicum is not on the list because despite the species
epithet, it was originally introduced from Scandinavia long ago.


"paghat" wrote in message
news
In article , Janet Baraclough..
wrote:

The message
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.

As I recently read a great deal on Douglas firs & a biography of David
Douglas himself, I assure you they've been in the UK vastly longer than
you seem in your comment allows, & the thing about the Douglas is it will
NOT remain in a production forest, which even if it did, production
forests themselves displace actual complex ecosystems. The tree is after
all named for a Scot, & David Douglas, who died in 1834, lived to see his
own trees big enough for harvests. His trees like ones planted in New
Zealand following his UK example quickly naturalized, because that's what
they're great at doing. Douglas did also plant the Sitka Spruce, so unless
his ghost did that post-WWII, you're off by well over a century.

What really happened post-WWII is the already decimated ancient forests
were cut down entirely. More of them than not. In twenty years all the
damage that had been done in five centuries before was exceeded. And it is
only quite recently that "back from the brink" projects have saved some
little bits of what little remains, & replanted what was long removed,
whereever possible.

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.

The Great Caledonian was so nearly destroyed that it became known as "the
remnant pine forest." Tim Clifford of the Caledonian Partnership said the
good fate of the Caledonian wasn't assured until the present decade, &
still requires good watchdogs. An assessment only five years ago was that
the Caledonian was "very far removed from the romantic ideal," the Native
Pinewoods Scheme having only begun in 1989 and not falling swiftly behind
the curve for its whole first decade before the Caledonian Partnership and
Trees for Life were formed. The modern attempt to restore its former
biodiversity is laudable to extreme, & nice that some old things weren't
taken in a very few central parts, but being forested since ancient times
is even so not what you are taking it mean. The Caledonian Forest's MODERN
restoration is an in-progress bit of heroism, but even if it weren't
nearly lost, given that the lifespan of a Caledonian pine is 200 to 350
years, & the Caledonian's birches are vastly younger than that, your "far
older than 600 years" doesn't wash. The RECORD age of any living
Caledonian pine is 550 years from a remote glen -- far older than they
would ordinarily live, but still shy of your "far older than 600 years"
even for the rare exceptions -- though compared to what England boasts,
Scottish trees are up there in age. On the other hand we must not mistake
the phrase "Ancient forest" for "Ancient trees," but more importantly,
don't mistake "Anent trees" for "biodiversity." One old Yew in a
churchyard is not a healthy ecosystem by itself, & the fact the Great
Caeldonian has very little in it older than a century -- a few of the
oldest a scant 300 years -- is not the measure of its health. It sounds
like its biodiversity is being restored in vast stretches of the new Great
Caledonian, & that's a great deal more important than any pretences of the
trees themselves being ancient -- health & old age are not necessarily the
same thing.

Then again, the reason it is important to identify the oldest Caledonians
is so they can be cloned. The Scottish pine is a subspecies, but only the
oldest ones are not hybridized! Less than 100 old Caledonians have been
identified as pure stock (amidst which is the one gauged to be 550 years
old, two centuries longer than their expected lifespans, & the real hope
for the survival of the subspecies, because Alan Fletcher trained a group
of advocates with the Forestry Commission to produce young replicas from
this old genetic stock -- the "merely" 200 year old trees being all
genetically polluted. So the only reason the TRULY native species isn't
doomed to extinction in the near future is because of modern cloning
techniques & the survival of 100 trees older than the expected lifespan in
an obscure glen. Such heroic efforts are NOT being made for everything, &
what I outlined remains largely true -- even in places where biodiversity
exists, truly NATIVE species are being displaced by invaders or hybridized
with introduced species -- so much so that even pure Caledonian pines
appear to have fallen down to 100 in number -- even in your "ancient"
forest where one would have expected an exception to such a rule.

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.

If it is not yet universally true, & there are some out of out of the wy
places, say, in Wales, where the redolence of scilla still fills the air,
then great. Ban the Spanish the hybridization is final & complete then!
But the anishing scent is written about in MANY articles; protected
expanses of bluebells in Sheffield are reportedly hybrids without scent, &
no less than the UK Wildlife Trust has sent out the alarm about few if any
English Bluebells being pure English Bluebells.

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 trust you put the Glastonbury Thorn in front of a smily emoticon because
you well knew it was already a big tourist fraud before Cromwell cut it
down, & it became doubly a fraud when it was afterword pretended to have
been magically resurged. British legends are wonderful things. They're not
comparable to DNA. But if we are to accept myths for science, then
according to the same myth of the Thorn's extravagant old age, it never
was a native species ever but was brought by sea from afar, so if it
really had lived for 2000 years and seeded all of Glastonberry, then
there's an invasive non-native problem for ya! Seems every ten miles
there's a church boasting the oldest tree in the UK in its churchyard,
often something like an oak that is incapable of living so long, & the
most "credible" of these many-centuries or millenia-old trees are at best
the great-great-great descendant of the trees their caretakers pretend
them to be. Such legends are lovely & to be encouraged, though completely
unrelated to science & ecology & the continuance of a diverse ecosystem.
When one looks for scientifically accredited ages, they shrink
dramatically, but even myth-makers can claim without cracking a smile that
the oldest tree in England is a 300 year old plane tree (I've hugged trees
three times that age right here in my county), while the ones pretending
to be much older rely on records of how long certain stories of them were
told rather than on how many rings they have.

Happily some trees in Scotland really are old even if the English ones are
frauds, & I'm betting more than a few Scots are glad to know it. The
oldest tree in Scotland, the Fortingill Yew, was pretended by generations
of caretakers to be 5,000 years old. It's not, of course. But how jolly
the Forestry Commission COULD show it was decently old, if sickly, at
1,760 years -- (since it was dated, the church has reportedly taken to
saying it is "only" 3,000 years old since the 5,000 year date was
disproven; strange they still can't bare the truth, that the Forestry
Commission was being pro-tourism to permit any age to it at all, it's
really just a young thing growing out of the dead grandparent, & it was
the dead tree that could be dated to 1,760 years. If any ancient forests
REALLY remained in England, these kinds of fibs, exaggerations, & reliance
on mythology where science fails, wouldn't be essential. I only have to go
for a walk to find trees older than the oldest ones that are tourist
treats in your beloved isles -- but it may not always be so, as our
president only this past week changed a few regulations so that more of
the Olympic rainforest could be cut down -- the youngest of those trees
being two or three centuries, & the ones that the lumberjacks are going to
get are over a thousand). But even if King John's Oak hadn't been a fraud,
even if the Glastonbury Thorn hadn't been two times dead in modern
history, even if the yew pretending to be 'the oldest living tree on
earth' weren't but a young tree growing from a dead one -- even if the
legends of ancientness weren't in the main all fables, such random old
survivors would not an ecosystem make.

Closer to reality is the history of Aster Wood which vanished slowly from
the Victorian era to the 1940s, when the very last of it was clearcut for
firewood. It's now an expanse of bushes at least, & a few trees coming
back, though not far from it is an entirely new woods that is supposed to
look pretty old though nothing in it is older than about 50 years.

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.

You seem not to to be taking into consideration how that ecosystems are
finite. If something takes over "the wetter, milder acid-soil west of the
UK" then native plants that required that environment did not magically
travel to the drier colder east & survive. The drier east has entirely
different invasives whic have displaced entirely different native plants,
or hybridized with them so that truly distinct races of plants disappear.
Similarly, the fact that one or two ancient forests belonging to Kings
were preserved exclusively for Kings to hunt in is very nice for those
forests, but they too are finite ecosystems, do not represent all the
species that grew north & south, east & west, & are have a lord's plenty
of species from three continents invading them.

Even in
ponticum-territory, not all woodlands are affected. Native forest-edge
and forest-understory still thrives in all parts of britain.

I hope you're right, but you seem to have a glowy impression of things
which your Wildlife Trust does not always share.

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.

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.

Well, all I can say is that it is English writers who have published
articles about the loss of the scent in the English Bluebell -- if it's
untrue in some places that is good (too bad it remains untrue of any
cultivated ones), but it's a well-documented & often written-of problem
always presented as a tragedy. And as you didn't know how long the Douglas
& Sitka firs have been in the UK, with the Douglas in particular
naturalized apart from production forests & in no location, production or
otherwise, permitting a native ecosystem co-exist with it, then I'm not
100% certain you know more about it than your own complaining ecologists.
If your best examples are a hawthorn that is only a tourist myth in age, &
the lovely Caledonian only now BEGINNING to be repopulated due to heroic
efforts to recover the native subspecies, well, my parallel to your
astonishment would be "I'm simply astonished that a Scot wouldn't know the
Caledonian pine came within 100 trees of not existing as a separate
subspecies." Except I'm not astonished; practically at my own back door
thousand-years-old firs are being removed from "protected" lands because
the President said it was okay, & if any gardener on my street knows about
that, it's because I informed them.

For the UK though, the lists of still-endangered UK species is long enough
that your insistance that it isn't true is just flat-out wishful thinking
-- but whether that really indicates a larger percentage of the overall
flora is gone than in most other places I wouldn't want to swear is true,
only that your rose-tinted glasses are causing you to miss a few bits of
reality. In the USA we're losing more species every year, and our gardens
are hybridizing with the forests just as avidly as began in the UK at
least 500 years sooner than here, & many of our commonest weeds are from
Europe or Central Asia. So I wouldn't pretend a better condition here --
but your rose colored glasses for the UK seem to be blinding!

-paggers

Janet.





--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

The message
from (paghat) contains these words:

In article , Janet Baraclough..
wrote:
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.

As I recently read a great deal on Douglas firs & a biography of David
Douglas himself, I assure you they've been in the UK vastly longer than
you seem in your comment allows, & the thing about the Douglas is it will
NOT remain in a production forest, which even if it did, production
forests themselves displace actual complex ecosystems. The tree is after
all named for a Scot, & David Douglas, who died in 1834, lived to see his
own trees big enough for harvests. His trees like ones planted in New
Zealand following his UK example quickly naturalized, because that's what
they're great at doing. Douglas did also plant the Sitka Spruce, so unless
his ghost did that post-WWII, you're off by well over a century.

You're at cross purposes. I have not suggested that Douglas Firs were
only introduced post WW2, or only used for commercial planting. You
mentioned lumber forests, which in the UK, means commercial plantations,
and that's what I was addressing.

There are plenty of ancient surviving woodlands, far older than 600
years; try a websearch on the Caledonian Forest.

The Great Caledonian was so nearly destroyed that it became known as "the
remnant pine forest."

You agree, then, that it exists, and is a surviving, ancient forest,
which originated far longer ago than 600 years. That is the point I was
making.

The Caledonian Forest's MODERN
restoration is an in-progress bit of heroism, but even if it weren't
nearly lost, given that the lifespan of a Caledonian pine is 200 to 350
years, & the Caledonian's birches are vastly younger than that, your "far
older than 600 years" doesn't wash. The RECORD age of any living
Caledonian pine is 550 years from a remote glen -- far older than they
would ordinarily live, but still shy of your "far older than 600 years"

In answer to you, I gave an example of a native *forest* which is
older than 600 years; you surely understand that ancient native forests
regenerate themselves and contain trees of different ages. IOW, a 1000
year old forest does not consist of trees that are all 1000 years old. I

even for the rare exceptions -- though compared to what England boasts,
Scottish trees are up there in age. On the other hand we must not mistake
the phrase "Ancient forest" for "Ancient trees," but more importantly,
don't mistake "Anent trees" for "biodiversity."

I haven't. Yet again, you have skewed the debate. I mentioned ancient
trees to explain why, (contrary to your claim), it is known what native
British trees were like in the past, before exotic introductions muddied
the genepool.

One old Yew in a
churchyard is not a healthy ecosystem by itself, & the fact the Great
Caeldonian has very little in it older than a century -- a few of the
oldest a scant 300 years -- is not the measure of its health. It sounds
like its biodiversity is being restored in vast stretches of the new Great
Caledonian, & that's a great deal more important than any pretences of the
trees themselves being ancient -- health & old age are not necessarily the
same thing.

I haven't claimed that ancient=healthy.

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.

If it is not yet universally true, & there are some out of out of the wy
places, say, in Wales, where the redolence of scilla still fills the air,
then great. Ban the Spanish the hybridization is final & complete then!
But the anishing scent is written about in MANY articles; protected
expanses of bluebells in Sheffield are reportedly hybrids without scent, &
no less than the UK Wildlife Trust has sent out the alarm about few if any
English Bluebells being pure English Bluebells.

Sheffield is an ex-steel-producing city in what used to be one of the
most heavily industrialised, de-natured, polluted parts of the UK. It
must rank as the absolute nadir of "natural habitats" for native flora.
(All native wildflowers are protected in the UK, btw).


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.

British legends are wonderful things. They're not
comparable to DNA.

I have not suggested they are.

I only have to go
for a walk to find trees older than the oldest ones that are tourist
treats in your beloved isles

It's not a ****ing contest to see who has the oldest trees. I simply
corrected the most glaring errors in Cereoids' claim and your follow-up.

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.

You seem not to to be taking into consideration how that ecosystems are
finite. If something takes over "the wetter, milder acid-soil west of the
UK" then native plants that required that environment did not magically
travel to the drier colder east & survive.

They can survive perfectly well in the many western areas where rp is
not invasive.Which part of " a limited habitat niche in parts of", did
you misconstrue this time?

Even in
ponticum-territory, not all woodlands are affected. Native forest-edge
and forest-understory still thrives in all parts of britain.

I hope you're right, but you seem to have a glowy impression of things
which your Wildlife Trust does not always share.

If, as ceroid claimed, Britain had no surviving native flora/ecology,
the Wildlife Trust would not exist. Correcting his mistakes and yours,
is not "creating a glowy impression".

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.

Well, all I can say is that it is English writers who have published
articles about the loss of the scent in the English Bluebell -- if it's
untrue in some places that is good (too bad it remains untrue of any
cultivated ones but it's a well-documented & often written-of problem
always presented as a tragedy.

It's often written about by bandwagon city hacks, true; but not
necessarily from personal experience. I've yet to read about scentless
English bluebells from the pen of a rural-dwelling writer. (Although
they are called English bluebells, they are also native to Wales and
Scotland btw.) Look, some parts of *ENGLAND* are grossly built-over,
crowded, industrialised, urbanised, chemically contaminated, denatured,
etc.(Sheffield for one). They have suffered an enormous loss of native
habitat, flora, fauna, ecology etc. Ever so surprisingly, people who
live there also frequently complain about reduced taste and smell. By an
extraordinary coincidence, when such people leave the south of England
for less urban, more civilised parts of the UK, they suddenly discover
that food tastes like it used to, wild flowers smell like they used to,
birds still sing etc.

And as you didn't know how long the Douglas
& Sitka firs have been in the UK,

That was your misinterpretation :-)

with the Douglas in particular
naturalized apart from production forests & in no location, production or
otherwise, permitting a native ecosystem co-exist with it,

That is also a misinterpretation on your part.

then I'm not
100% certain you know more about it than your own complaining ecologists.


For the UK though, the lists of still-endangered UK species is long enough
that your insistance that it isn't true is just flat-out wishful thinking

I didn't say that. You discredit yourself with such tactics, whether
they be deliberate or accidental.

Janet

The message m
from "Cereus-validus" contains these words:

A quick search revealed that there are a still a few remaining species of
flowering plants endemic to the British islands and nowhere else but most if
not all of them are on the verge of extinction by being overrun by
introduced weedy species and destruction of habitat.

That is considerably different from your earlier claim that

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.

Now all you need do is change your revised version to "there are many
remaining British wild species" and "some, (not all, not most) of them
are on the verge of extinction" and you'd alsmost sound as if you knew
something about the subject.


Janet.

Sorry little Broccoli,

I still stand by both my original statement as well as my more recent one.
The very few remaining endemic species are but a trifle compared to what
must have resided on the islands before man took over, cut down the forests,
radically modified the environment and introduced many exotic alien species
for food, their gardens and many weed species along with them.

You carry on as if I am holding you responsible for what your ancestors did.
If you have a problem with that, you are a real pip. Its happened and there
is nothing you can about it. Extinction is forever!


"Janet Baraclough.." wrote in message
...
The message m
from "Cereus-validus" contains these words:

A quick search revealed that there are a still a few remaining species
of
flowering plants endemic to the British islands and nowhere else but
most if
not all of them are on the verge of extinction by being overrun by
introduced weedy species and destruction of habitat.

That is considerably different from your earlier claim that

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.

Now all you need do is change your revised version to "there are many
remaining British wild species" and "some, (not all, not most) of them
are on the verge of extinction" and you'd alsmost sound as if you knew
something about the subject.


Janet.

I did think I was agreeing with Cereus-validus. Absit invidia. Personally I
did garden, for fifteen years, in a desert climate in the Canary Islands
where rain was something that fell elsewhere. I still have the garden and
still attempt to grow the very marginals as well as those more suited.
Janet summed up the British flora well and eloquently. Not only have we
retained all of our native species but we have added from the best that the
world has to offer~ some being very marginal. I would imagine the US
attempts similarly.
We even sustain the flora of other climates so they can restock if
necessary~ Kew is the keeper of world-wide species ~endangered or otherwise.
Their collection is without limit.
Visiting Italy I found some fabulous gardens and was somewhat
disappointed to find they were of British [usually Scottish] origin.
My bluebells cover an acre of woodland and have been with us, as a
family, for hundreds of years. The only variation has been an odd white or
rose specimen.
Our only loss of species has been the Elm and even those are possibly
recovering. We had two specimens that showed some resistance. S.O.D has now
been identified locally and we will just have to wait and see.
Visit the UK if you ever have the opportunity and enjoy our nation wide
hobby.
Best Wishes.
"Cereus-validus" wrote in message
. com...
Dude, you live in England and you have seem to have no idea what we are
talking about. You live in a cloudy rainy climate. You have probably never
been to the desert Southwest of the USA nor have ever experienced truly
dry
conditions first hand and you would surely quickly sunburn and shrivel
away
under the intense summer head and dryness if you did.

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. I have seen so-called wild flower books of England
and almost every plant in it was actually an introduced weed from
elsewhere
in Europe, Asia or even North America. There is now even an aquatic
Crassula
from New Zealand that has become a widespread pest in England.


"Brian" wrote in message
...
I feel that it is presence, rather than lack, of imagination that seems
to
prompt all gardeners to attempt to grow the borderline
possibles.Whatever
nationality. The flora of a differing climate always seem the most
desirable. Personally I have tried and failed with many so-called
exotics.
Even a little success bring much pleasure~~ Palms and Eucalypts have
flourished locally for the last twenty years in SW England and await the
first real winter!!.
However I have never seen a deliberate mass of Ivy ~~ English or
otherwise. I can think of little less desirable.
Best Wishes.
"Cereus-validus" wrote in message
. com...
Its symptomatic of the lack of imagination of the average American
gardener.

There are a huge number of dry land plants, including trees, shrubs,
vines,
bulbs and succulents, that are vastly more interesting and more
colorful
than the limited selection of plants that can grow in an English
garden.

Many Dutch bulbs, especially Tulips, do better under the arid
Mediterranean
conditions from which they originate than the colder conditions many
gardeners force them to grow.

The wide variety of succulents from all over the world that can be
grown
under arid Mediterranean conditions almost boggles the mind.


"J. Del Col" wrote in message
m...
"Cereus-validus" wrote in message
. com...
Never understood why people insist on trying to create an English
garden
in
the desert southwest when there are thousands of other more
suitable
and
far
more interesting Mediterranean climate plants that would do much
better
under their conditions.

You will save yourself and your community much precious water by
planting
things that will actually thrive in your climate.


Indeed. Even Gertrude Jekyll, the panjandrum of English gardening,
expressed puzzlement as to why Americans wanted to replicate
English
gardens in climates unsuited to them. She encouraged them to
experiment with native plants and others fit for local conditions.


J. Del Col