An eager crowd has gathered beside an old flooded claypit in the grounds of Maydencroft Manor to celebrate a royal arrival. Once owned by the crown, this estate is now a native breeds farm where English longhorn cattle are reared for conservation grazing. Although the medieval manor house has accommodated queens and knights over the centuries, today’s noble guest has not enjoyed such luxurious surroundings. He’s spent the week in a bucket of water in my garden shed.
Our VIP (Very Important Poplar) is a male black poplar cutting from the royal estate at Sandringham, kindly donated by “phantom tree planter” Roger Jefcoate, to replace Hitchin’s much-loved hybrid black poplar that toppled in storms last year.
With the rugged magnificence of this fallen veteran in mind, it is with some trepidation that I face the group at the planting site, clutching an ostensibly dead stick. I explain that black poplars, like many floodplain trees, readily reproduce by vegetative means (often from fallen branches or windthrown trunks), so this hardwood cutting has a good chance of rooting.
Yet, despite their resilience, black poplars (Populus nigra subsp.betulifolia) are one of the UK’s most endangered tree species. Of the 7,719 recorded in the national database, only about 600 are female – rarely planted due to their copious production of fluffy seeds. Even worse, most are nearing the end of their 200-year lifespan and, due to the paucity of females and of wet alluvial soil needed for seeds to germinate, there’s little evidence of sexual reproduction.
Here in Hertfordshire, our floodplain Ents and their lost Entwives are long gone. Their shadows haunt old botanical notebooks and forgotten coppice stools, except on the periphery of the county along the Thame, Ash and Stort rivers, where mature black poplars can still be found. So we plant our arbor populi – our tree of the people – and the children water and mulch it. I wonder what climatic changes the royal youngster will have to weather over the next 200 years if he is to reach the venerable age of the late black poplar by the Ash Brook.
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