#trees though

(its ivy on a tall tree stump.)

You shouldn't have favourites, of course, because you're not supposed to choose between your children BUT there's always a few I feel particularly close to.

When I was a kid and my dad was teaching my sister and I to identify trees, we all sort of picked a favourite - his, because he was a gloriously basic bitch, was the oak.

And I mean, yeah, obviously. It's such an easy answer. In the UK, nothing else at all has a leaf shape like that, so it's the first one kids identify other than holly, which has by and large cashed in on the commercialisation of Christmas extremely successfully to pull off "most recognisable tree"; but also, oaks have Mysticism and Cultural Relevance and Gravitas and Vast Ecological Services, and twisty branches that look cool as fuck. Plus, they're hybridising sluts. We love a slutty tree. So yes OBVIOUSLY he liked oak best. They're the greatest in the same way that Hamlet is the greatest Shakespeare play, and you start getting complacent about that and are like "Yeah, Hamlet, whatever" and then you watch Hamlet and you're like "Actually, fuck me, Hamlet is legit incredible, The Hype Is Fair."

My mam likes the beech. Interestingly, even though their leaves look nothing alike, they're actually quite closely related. But whereas oaks go down the gnarly route, with twisty limbs and fissured bark, beeches have these smooth grey trunks like elephant legs, complete with wrinkles round the feet. And their leaves go the most beautiful copper and gold in autumn, making a wander through an autumn beechwood into an Experience akin to a cathedral. Photos never do it justice. You have to see it for yourself.

Tolkein based Lothlorien on beechwoods. You can really see it. We don't commonly have them in Wales without human intervention - it's a native tree, but things get too wet for them as you go west. But there are pockets here and there, and they are stunning.

(On the mountain at the end of the valley where I grew up, we found an oak and a beech that had fused into one tree. It's not unheard of, for trees to do that - they kind of envelop things in their path as they grow, and they don't reject tissues. But oaks and beeches being closely related makes it more common between them.

I still have some of my dad's ashes (his big toe, possibly); after my mam dies, I'll take some of hers, and I'll bury those ashes into the roots of those trees so they can be together.)

My sister liked the hazel. I think it's partly because the most endearing trait of hazels is that they have leaves that feel like fluffy velvet to touch; the upper side is covered in fine hairs that produce a soft, furry sort of feel. Although, actually, the nice thing with hazels is that they keep a lot of ID features throughout the year. I can ID an oak even in the depths of winter now, now that I'm an ecology-trained adult; but as kids, we needed a bit more from a tree in the off season to get it right. Hazels have catkins, and in the spring they have these unique buds with tiny magenta flowers on.

And of course, the hazelnuts. We used to collect them as they fell, before the squirrels could get to them, and that was a big family activity. Hazels are often hedgerow trees, and they nut (feel free to giggle) at the same time as the blackberries, which also like hedgerows; so we usually collected them at the same time in late summer, and THAT happened around my sister's birthday. So, they were a special tree to her. I think of her when I think of hazels even now.

And then mine, if I'm remembering right, was the ash.

And I do love an ash. It's a very elegant tree; chandelier-shaped branches and twigs, unique black deer hoof buds, geometrically tidy and recognisable leaf arrangements. When young it has smooth bark; it fissures around 80 years or so, and yet into the tidiest fissures you've ever seen. It prefers a neutral-to-alkaline soil, so the ground layer in an ash wood is usually very diverse, meaning a very beautiful riot of colours and shapes and other organisms. Even now, I still love it.

They're all dying now. Ash dieback, a fungal disease. Last year, we discovered that some UK ashes seem to have developed a resistance to it, so they might be moving towards a recovery; but, the estimates are a 90% loss, and ash is our third most populous tree. Still though; there is hope, for now.

But: is it still my favourite?

Maybe! Hard to say. I have a soft spot for alders; they're underdogs, really, often overlooked, but they're a bit like an amphibious hazel. Bright orange wood, too. You find them in wet woods, so I'm very familiar with them (lol).

Birches, of course. The ultimate in winter ID. Elegant and beautiful, and the first to colonise a disturbed site to turn it back into woodland. I love the dichotomy of that - the delicate growth form, and yet tough enough to punch through minespoil, preparing the way for those that come after them.

Aspens - the little diamonds on the bark, the whispering leaves. There's a cluster growing a few streets away from my house, and they've helped reclaim the old copperworks, turning it from a dumping ground for copper slag into a vibrant greenspace.

Hawthorn - my sister and I got bitten by so many as kids! They're viciously defended. But summer starts when the mayflower blooms, and my absolute favourite season is early summer - the bit where the weather warms but gets no hotter, the flowers come out, the forest canopies close over again, the birds are nesting, the butterflies and bees are on the wing. It starts with the mayflower blooming, even if you get bitten if you touch it. And the berries last long into the autumn, meaning a larder for birds.

Field maple. The first tree I ever taught my dad, not the other way around. (The second - and last - was a hornbeam). The only native acer to Wales, with leaves that look like a hawthorn and a sycamore had a baby, and crocodile bark along the twigs, and sap you can make syrup from.

Cherry trees - caterpillar bark and stunning autumn colours. Yews, ancient and deadly and yet so climbable. Willows, scratty and defiant and so, so ecologically important.

And the trees of my parents, of course. Oaks, and beeches. I Am Not Immune To Fagaceae Propaganda. They're spectacular, and they're mega popular for a reason. I see everything my parents see in them; more, now that I work in the industry I do.

But also since losing my father, I feel more of a personal kinship with them. Oaks in particular. So, although the answer is most likely "I don't actually have a favourite, because it's usually whichever I'm looking at and gushing about at the time", I think the easier answer is probably oaks.

And also Hamlet, for Shakespeare plays. Fuck.

*****

Epilogue: I asked my sister her opinion:

Oh, well, it’s a multi-step process, of course. Let me talk you through it.

Step 1

Sing the Treesongs, the Endsongs. Sing it to its final resting place. Reflect on the wisdoms it learned in its long life; the noble spirit now past.

Step 2

Take the last fallen wood of its limbs, so steadfast, so sure in life. Gather up this timber, singing thanks for this final gift.

Step 3

Fasten the wood into a torch; a tool and companion that will help light your way through the darkness, and bring you comfort as you cling on against the storm.

Step 4

Buy a pitchfork. A sharp one.

Step 5

Get down to the council offices with the torch, the pitchfork and ~100 angry friends and cut the bitch that authorised the tree being cut down. Eviscerate them. Make them pay.

Step 6

Ah, going Tory-hunting, are we? Good good. “For a book”, got it.

Okay! So, yes, is the answer. I don’t know how broadly you want to go into the World Of Plants, in terms of global distribution? But since you’re asking me, I’m guessing you want some UKvian/north west European answers. I also don’t know how historical you need me to be, so I’ll stick to natives where I can.

Also, it should be noted that pretty much any plant can kill you if you eat enough of it? But I’m assuming you want something a bit more ‘contained in a mysterious phial’ or ‘chopped into a soup’ rather than ‘six tonnes of common daisy, eat up, Your Majesty’.

Fatal Shit

The foxglove (Digitalis purpurea). Very pretty plant that loves hedges and forests and occasionally comes in white:

You know that scene in Casino Royale where Bond is poisoned and has to shoot himself up in his car to not die? That was digitalis, i.e. the active compound in these things. It fucks up your heart and that. In fact, the medicinal compound that has been scientifically extracted from digitalis - digoxin - is used in modern medicine, but straight from the plant is toxic.

It’s possible to simply really fuck someone up with these, but very easy to outright kill them, and a fine line to walk. It wouldn’t be easy to intentionally give them just a low dose. 

***

Deadly Nightshade, (Atropa belladonna). I like this one! In extremely low doses it’s a herb, actually, so there’s even narrative Plausible Deniability for it being in a kitchen/people getting overdosed.

This is it:

This, on the other hand, is not:

That’s Woody Nightshade, or Solarum dulcamara, which is also poisonous but rarely fatally so, and seems to be plastered throughout the internet on primarily USian sites labelled as Deadly Nightshade. 

Anyway. The berries and leaves are the deadly bits, and cause delirium and hallucinations. And, you know, death. This one is easier to control for effect than digitalis, mind, so you can poison or kill here. It’s also been used as a cosmetic, because it can make the pupils dilate, which as we all know, is the sexiest part of the human body.

It’s antidote is physostigmine, found naturally in the Calabar bean from Nigeria, although it is itself pretty poisonous. Or I think pilocarpine works, which is found in a South American plant, but I don’t know which.

***

The Yew Tree, (Taxus baccata). A particularly great entrant to any list, frankly. Love me a yew.

LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL anyway, yew trees were worshipped by Celtic peoples as representing a Cult of Immortality, because they live for literally thousands of years. They are also almost entirely poisonous. Like… leaves, bark, wood seeds, everything. The only thing that isn’t, ironically, is the flesh of the berries, and as long as you didn’t chew - and therefore break - the seeds, they’d probably pass right through you and be fine. But as few as three seeds would poison you.

Also, most plants lose their toxins after pruning. Not yew. Cut branches are just as dangerous.

The fun bit is the symptoms, because most times, there aren’t any. You just die a few hours after eating. Some indigestion, like. That’s it. If there are, we’re looking at shaking, coldness, and falling over a lot. 

***

Hellebore (Helleborus spp). Pretty plants that flower in winter, so people like them.

The roots are toxic, causing wicked D and V and also death if you eat too much. People used to give them to kids to try to de-worm them, and a lot of kids died that way.

Interestingly, though, the seeds in particular cause skin problems after contact - burning and itching, usually. Potentially a good Clue for who the poisoner is, if their hands are all itchy and that.

***

Ragwort (Senecio jacobaea). So, in the Real World there are precious few examples of people being poisoned by ragwort, though plenty of it happening to horses; but that’s because we’re generally pretty careful with the stuff, and also it’s not fatal to most.

The exception is people with liver problems.

Someone with any sort of liver condition could be killed by this stuff, because at high enough levels it will cause complete liver failure. But, you’d have to either make them eat about 14lbs of the plant in one go (unlikely), or you’d have to make them drink it as a herbal tea over a long period (more likely). The toxins don’t accumulate in the body, but the liver damage does. It was for a while considered to be a cough remedy, too, so it’s a good one for plausible deniability.

Symptoms include lethargy, staggering, walking around like a zombie, and sometimes blindness.

***

Hemlock Water-Dropwort (Oenanthe crocata). Yeah, this is hemlock, Famous Poison of Antiquity. They killed many a Greek philosopher with this stuff. 

Great for plausible deniabilty - the full plant is almost identical to the fully-edible cow parsley, the stems can look like celery when chopped, and the roots look like wild parsnips. But, the toxins are quite unstable. Cooking can break them down - if not completely, then at least to survivable levels. But you’d still be sick as a dog from it, and you would need hospitalisation. 

Vomiting and nausea are the main symptoms, but convulsions and seizures are also up there. And, of course, death. There’s also some suggestion that it’s more potent in winter, and less so from April onwards? It’s unproven as of yet, but it is an interesting pattern in toxicity levels.

***

Non-Fatal

Lords and Ladies/Cuckoopint (Arum maculatum). It has approximately 8003 common names, this one, but Lords and Ladies is poetic, and cuckoopint is an old word meaning a cuckoo’s dick, so those are the ones I’ve included.

Some people apparently mistake it for wild garlic, since they grow in the same places and times? i don’t see it myself, but I’m told it’s a common mistake.

It is poisonous, but you’d have a job eating enough to kill yourself - it induces vomiting fast, and a prickly burning in the mouth even faster, so you wouldn’t be able to ingest more. This is true of both the leaves and the berries. So a good one to make someone ill, and they’d be sore for days, but very unlikely to kill someone.

***

Greater Celandine (Chelidonium majus). No relation to lesser celandine. Botany is wild.

Anyway, the juice in the stem is bright yellow and can cause nausea if ingested, and burning on the skin; historically, it was used to remove warts. But it tastes disgusting, as so many of these do, so it would have to be masked somehow. 

***

Spindle (Euonymous europaeus). Beautiful tree, five stars out of three.

Those are the berries! SO PRETTY but eating the berries will fuck you up nicely - D and V, heart palpitations, hallucinations and symptoms akin to meningitis. Unlikely to be fatal to a healthy person, mind. 

Again, though, tastes like arse.

***

‘Orrible Tortury Things

Hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium). Nawr te. Here we get nasty.

This is hogweed. Tip to tip it can be about 6 feet of chlorophylled malice, but usually it’s around the four-to-five mark. The reason for it’s inclusion here lies in the sap, which contains, essentially, a compound that turns you into a fucking vampire.

How? you may be asking. Well - through a condition called phytophotodermatitis, which is where the sap basically strips out your skin’s ability to slather on the melanin and so the moment UV light hits the spot it burns. And I mean burns. Literal burns. Want to see a gross picture?

Yeah. And it’s not a one-off burn - you have to keep the skin out of the sun for a year or so before it stops reacting, even after the burn is healed. I work with people who have had hogweed burns (in my line of work it’s a professional hazard), and even mild ones will still suddenly show up again in the shower six months later.

It’s not as bad as one of our new Invasive Species, though - Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum). That one burns. Google ‘giant hogweed burns’ for the grossest google session of your life. That causes literal third degree burns, and it’s a good six years before you’re back to normal. That’s only been about in UKvia for about 200 years, though.

In conclusion, you don’t fuck about with hogweed.

***

Stinging nettles (Urtica dioica). What list of Nast Plants would be complete without the humble stingy, eh?

We’ve all done our time with this bastard. Very common, touching the edges of the leaves produces a strong sting, a bit like mild bees. It’s entirely bearable, like, and actually, there are some people who whip their arthritic joints with nettles and report that it makes the swelling go down. But it’s not enjoyable, and being whipped with these would fucking hurt. Plus, it takes a while for the rash to fuck off.

It’s also highly nutritious and edible, though, and you can spin it into cloth. Non-stingy cloth, I might add. Go figure.

***

Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa). A wonderful tree that gives us sloes which give us delicious sloe gin.

But it also has thorns. Now - professional tree knowledge coming in here - in fact, in the moment it hurts more to be bitten by a hawthorn. But, hawthorns will merely bite, and are non-venomous.

Blackthorns are venomous. As long as you clean the cuts and, crucially, don’t leave thorns in you, you’re fine. But if you leave a thorn in you, it will give you septicemia, which can be extremely nasty. Potentially fatal, actually, so possibly this could go further up the page? Dunno how you’d manage that, though.

***

OOH! I can help!!!

Okay, so a favourite local one of mine is Size of Wales. They spotted the weird habit of BBC journalists to use the “size of Wales” as a unit of measurement, and how it’s generally applied to ecological devastation (e.g. an area of rainforest THE SIZE OF WALES is destroyed every day) and went ‘yeah nah fuck this’. So they made it their mission to plant an area of rainforest the size of Wales, with the tagline ‘Part of the solution, not a measure of the problem’. By now, they’ve actually done it, so the new goal is to plant an area TWICE THE SIZE OF WALES!!

But it’s not just tree planting, like. The Welsh Government’s Wellbeing of Future Generations Act has strong opinions on the three pillars of sustainability, and they apply those. So, for example, one of their ongoing projects right now is in Kenya’s Mt Elgon, where the native Ogiek people are being evicted from their land in the name of Conservation. Size of Wales contends that the Ogiek are better forest guardians than anyone else, since the Ogiek themselves have demonstrated that deforestation decreases under their watch. So they’re helping the Ogiek with the legal stuff, and helping them liaise with other organisations like conservation agencies and local governments and that.

And they’re planting a tree for every child born or adopted in Wales, so. There’s that too.

TreeAid! Another one that does good sustainability work, in this case in the drylands of Ghana, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. They help plant the trees in ways that help with local agriculture (soil improvement and water retention and that sort of stuff), but also they fight for the rights of local communities to harvest from the trees, and teach them how to make non-food products from them.

Trees For Life is a Scottish initiative to try to restore the Caledonian Forest, which I believe is a globally unique ecosystem. It also does fun rewilding stuff, if that’s your bag - I think beaver reintroduction is their current big push, which is vital if we want any sort of flood defence in the climate changing days to come.

Trees for Cities is a nice twist - they focus on planting trees in urban areas, which frequently go tragically un-treed. But that varies from little urban woodlands to edible woodlands for local communities, including edible playgrounds that teach kids how to grow food. Plus I think they do some international stuff, too.

And then, of course, there’s the Woodland Trust and the Tree Council. They’re probably the two biggies. They also both claim to be the UK’s leading tree charity, so one of them must be lying, but who knows which? Probably the Tree Council. I reckon more people have heard of the Woodland Trust, so they’re probably bigger. Make of that what you will. Tedious billy-waving pricks.