Placing Correct Tree

As part of my elongated preparation for the PCT I have decided I need to know trees.  I need to know all the fauna and wildlife but I best start with trees.  They are big and obvious.  And I’m starting with those here in the UK.  (well hoping that staring at pictures of trees in America will mean that when I arrive I can recall them perfectly, felt a little over optimistic).

I’m not very good at it.  I often can’t remember a tree I named the day before.  And I don’t have much confidence when I do.  It is as if by naming a tree I am lessening it, unless that is I am getting it right.  Right and the tree takes on majesty, important because at some point for someone that kind of tree has had a role.  A thing named is a thing given substance.  Wrongly named and quite the opposite, worse than leaving it alone, unlabelled.  With that it would become a confusion, as if asking it to do things it isn’t suitable for.  A Shire horse being asked to run in the Derby.

But that all said I am getting better, and with no one there to contradict me it means I might as well stand proud and proclaim that today I found a line of white poplar sapling leading to the mother that was cozied in with a black poplar.  Elsewhere there were lines of birches and hawthorns.  A field maple hiding behind one of a number of young oaks.  A garden with three London Planes and my favourite find and Elm Tree.  At ten meters tall they become infected and start to die back, perhaps to grow again one day.  This one was about that height and looking unwell, covered in tiny white insects. 

So it’s not yet time to turn my attention to the trees of Washington but already for the first time in my life I do not feel like a wild life dunderhead, and it wasn’t that difficult. 

Right now though I know only one PCT tree for sure.  The kind that stands, long after it is dead, from disease, age or fire.  Whatever it was in life, in proud, defiant death they are all called rampikes.