A visit to one of Britain’s tallest trees

Ashley Peace at treeblog visited the Hermitage, Dunkeld (in the Scottish Highlands), to see Britain’s 3rd tallest tree, and came back with some fine black-and-white photos of the tree and the surrounding area.

Exploring the Caledonian pinewood

Last month we linked to Part 1 of a report on a visit to a surviving fragment of Scotland’s once extensive pine forest. Ashley has since added a Part 2 and Part 3. His photos give a good flavor of the landscape.

Heather, bilberry (blaeberry) and juniper form the shrub storey while Scots pine forms a rather open canopy, with a few downy birches for company. Other trees I saw in the Ryvoan Pass, but in miniscule numbers, were willow, rowan, holly and alder.

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A-B-Tree / A-B-Craobh

willow catkins (from cybercrofter)

In the Scottish Highlands, Mandy Haggith at cybercrofter is celebrating the International Year of the Forest with a fascinating project, exploring the ancient links between the Gaelic alphabet and trees in Scotland, with ecology, folklore, practical tree knowledge and creative writing. “I have now completed 18 creative writing events, one for each tree associated with a letter of the Gaelic alphabet,” she writes.

So that’s phase 1 of the project complete, and now I’m getting under way with phase 2, which is to gather all of the information I have collected about the trees and write it up. Quite what form that writing will take is still pretty fluid, and I’m open to suggestions.

Stop by to read her ideas and weigh in. The project, called, A-B-Tree / A-B-Craobh, also has its own webpage.