Conifers On My Mind

Conifers have been occupying my website time of late and I've finally got the bulk of the East Anglian species up onto Flora of East Anglia now. I may still add more at a later stage, since quite a few of the cultivated varieties can look very different to their original parent species and can cause a lot of confusion. It has been a slow process getting the conifer photos sorted, not least because at an early stage I used Lynford Arboretum as a source of material, before it became very obvious to me that so many of the plants there are incorrectly labelled! I always think that an arboretum with misidentified trees is worse than one with no labels at all, since an absence of labels at least prompts one to get the books out! The Abies species in particular got me tied up in knots and I am sure I will re-visit that group at some point!

We do very poorly in the UK for conifers, with just three native species in the entire country! However, a long history of plant discovery and collection around the world has left us a heritage of magnificent trees to enjoy, many of which show up as self-seeded individuals or long-established plants in public spaces. This impressive specimen of Grecian Fir (Abies cephalonica) can be seen in Earlham Road Cemetery, Norwich.

On the Flora of East Anglia website, I've tried to make sure that usable features for identifying plants are employed; some books use the cones as the main identification feature for the Silver Firs (Abies species) which is rather daft, since the cones not only break apart on the tree (making measurements extremely difficult to achieve) but they also typically only appear at the very top of very tall specimens! This piece of Noble Fir (Abies procera) from the top of a felled specimen at Felbrigg Hall illustrates the point nicely!

I put this photo in as a reminder that the wonderful spring 'flowers' of our larch trees are not too far away now - more on them another time!