Hunting the snark.....
..or first find your tree
If the Black Poplar is actually saved - and it's not out of the woods yet (!)- it will be thanks to the great efforts of a comparatively small band of botanists, foresters, academics and just plain fans.
The undoubted leader and inspiration of this band was Edgar Milne-Redhead M.B.E., I.S.O.,T.D, who died on June 29, 1996, aged 91. (Click for EMR's obituary)
Milne-Redhead's passion for what he called 'our rarest and most splendid native timber tree' began during his first year as a Natural Science student at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, in 1925. Part of the course involved the study of three Black Poplars at Madingley, near Cambridge, and the ways in which they differed from the common poplar hybrid x canadensis .
The three trees are long since gone, the last having been felled in 1984. But the enthusiasm they generated in the young Milne-Redhead remained with him for the rest of his life.
For the rest of his life he kept notes of Black Poplars wherever he saw them. He also began to submit site records to the Botanical Society of the British Isles , where records co-ordinator Jane Croft has painstakingly compiled them into a national database. In 1976, using a small grant from the then-World Wildlife Fund, he made a two-week tour of England and Wales checking reported Black Poplar sites and establishing a network of enthusiastic helpers.
In 1990 he published The BSBI Black Poplar Survey, 1973-88 (Watsonia, 18, 1-5), the first definitive site-map for the tree. MR (as colleagues knew him) was still identifying native poplar samples until just a few weeks before his death. The national Black Poplar database now held at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology in Cambridgeshire owes much to his painstaking work and his great expertise.
As knowledge of MR's interest and enthusiasm for the disappearing tree began to spread, others joined in the hunt..
One was forester Eric Rogers. Eric - now retired - contacted MR in 1984 after finding the fantastic Black Poplar near Butley, in Suffolk. His find began a fascination that still endures - and which put Eric at the forefront of what was to become a full-blown campaign to save the species. He is the author of several papers and leaflets on the Black Poplar, including one for the Quarterly Journal of Forestry, the official publication of the Royal Forestry Society.
John White was research dendrologist at the Forestry Commission's Westonbirt Arboretum when he became 'hooked' on the Black Poplar and its potential fate. He is a national authority on the identification of the tree - a famously difficult task. John has now retired from Westonbirt, and acts as a consultant dendrologist.
Mike Barber, a technician for Huntingdonshire District Council's countryside section, and David Evans, the Council's Tree Officer, were argueably the two most responsible for bringing the plight of the Black Poplar to national attention. Hearing of the tree's rarity, they began to search for them in Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire. Between them they found an amazing 30 trees -including a single specimen at Catworth, Cambridgeshire -- just a short distance from my home.
After being shown the Catworth tree, I decided to write an article for the Daily Telegraph asking
readers to help look for more Black Poplars. The response was fantastic.
It was the beginning of The Daily Telegraph Black Poplar Hunt.....