Quirky trees to spot on your travels
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Gardeners thinking of booking a holiday may now be poring over beautiful gardens they can visit across the continents – but there are also some awe-inspiring trees to be admired. Anyone visiting arboretums this year may wonder at everything from the mighty oak to the weeping willow, yet venture further from our shores and there are some amazing specimens with names as quirky as dragon’s blood, flame of the forest and quiver tree.
You may want to travel to Australia to see 90m-high mountain ash, or to the Sierra Nevada to admire the giant sequoias, or to Japan to see the stunning puffs of cherry blossom (sakura) appear in spring. If you can’t decide where to go, help is at hand from Matthew Collins, garden and travel writer, and head gardener at London’s Garden Museum, who with fellow garden writer, Thomas Rutter, has produced The Tree Atlas, a coffee-table tome and guide to discovering the world’s most beautiful, unusual, majestic and colourful trees on your travels.
The book features 50 different tree species from across the world and not only do the authors describe the trees in detail, but they show you where and when to see each variety, how to get to the locations and how to identify them. Here are five of the more unusual trees you might want to spot on your travels.
1. Dragon’s blood tree – Yemen. The national tree of Yemen is so called because of the deep red resin in its bark which appears to bleed when cut. Yet it is vital to the landscape, as its dense umbrella canopy provides shade and redirects moisture to the soil beneath, enabling other plants to grow.
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