Beautiful Black Poplars
Over the years native Black poplars have properly done my head in. We planted one here a while ago from someone I thought was a reputable supplier. It puts on prodigous growth and is definitely not a native Black poplar. To my untutored eye it looks more Lombardy than anything else. Grrr...
More recently we had another unhappy experience with Populus nigra, featuring a large and I thought reliable nursery. We queried the provenance of the trees they were offering and - to cut a very long story short - we were right to. Curiously the Forestry Commission, who we went to for help in sorting this out, were spectacularly uninterested. Double grrr...
I see plants offered online which are - definitely - not native Black poplars. Poplars hybridise like crazy, so I guess it's an easy area of confusion. It's fertile ground for plant geneticists, and there's been some good DNA analysis on the non-hybrid clones there are out there, identifying 87. There's a register of these true clones.
Our native Black poplars are now extremely rare, and hybridisation isn't the only reason for their decline. They used to be much more common, particularly in places like our part of the world - Somerset - where they loved the heavy wet soils. Many of these sites have been drained and are now too dry for them to thrive. They're big trees too, with invasive root systems. Once highly valued, they grow too slowly for contemporary wood production and the female plants have fluffy white seeds which some find offensive. So they haven't been planted much, either as amenity trees or for forestry, and the female trees are rarer than hens' teeth. Until not so long ago they were actually agressively removed.
All this - and the obvious attractions of such a charismatic tree - made me jump at the chance to meet someone who was growing them.
Lindengate are based in one of the last surviving Black poplar strongholds, Aylesbury, which seemed a good start. Of the estimated 7,000 trees left in the UK, apparently over half are in the Vale of Aylesbury, so they had a reasonable supply of plant material to hand.
And when I arrived I saw rows of little - and not so little! - potted Black poplars. They were immaculately labelled, grown from large cuttings ("truncheons"). There were male and female plants, from a good range of numbered clones.
Lindengate are not a commercial nursery. They're a ground breaking mental health charity, providing locals with a range of nature based activities. They grew plants as part of this work, and were interested in selling them more widely to raise some funds. I was so pleased they got in touch.
A few weeks later Lindengate had their plant passporting number and their packaging material, and we were good to go. I hope we'll be able to sell lots of plants for them; partly to raise them some money and partly to help restore the fortunes of these majestic trees in our landscape.