Tree of the Month - June
The National Arboretum at Westonbirt in Gloucestershire has 250 champion trees, many of them large and beautiful and many of them justifiably well known. So it was a pleasant surprise this year to find a brand new one: a Paper-bark Birch (Betula papyrifera) in a part of the upper Poplar Valley without any other ornamental plantings and previously unidentified. It is much the tallest example of this North American birch to have been recorded in Britain, at 29.4m or nearly a hundred feet; only a handful of wild birches have grown any taller.
Owen Johnson MBE VMM
(Photo: Owen Johnson)