Britain’s trees are being felled by diseases

Nobody is counting the trees Britain has lost to diseases, because it is difficult to keep track of millions of hectares of woodland. But on ash and elm, oak and beech, horse chestnut, alder and larch, diseases are spreading. Some kill. In London the leaves of horse-chestnut trees curl, brown and wither long before autumn arrives. In Devon and in Cumbria, ailing ash trees lift their skeletal silver fingers to the sky. In Dumfries and Galloway, hillsides of larch have been felled.

On an autumn day at the edge of Lake Windermere in the Lake District, Great Knott Wood sits in sunshine. This is archetypal English woodland, not particularly dark or deep but with cultural roots that spread far into the national story. Wordsworth wandered here, exulting at “Nature’s fairest forms”. Now some of those forms are threatened. Sudden larch death, which arrived in Britain in 2002, has just been found here.

Buy a potted plant and you may assume that you have bought a single species. You have not. In a recent paper in the, Alexandra Puertolas and three co-authors analysed the soil in 99 woody plants bought in Britain and the Netherlands: 90% contained organisms capable of causing diseases, some serious. It is perhaps better to think of bought trees less as plants in pots than as Petri dishes of potential pathogens which also contain a tree.

The globalisation of tree cultivation means that many countries are experiencing similar problems. But they are unusually severe in Britain, which has few tree nurseries and is one of the least wooded countries in Europe, a fact it is trying to change. The value of tree imports has increased from £6m in 1992 , to £93m today, an increase of nearly 650%. The Forestry Commission counted 4.

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