Was Aspen once an important feature of Cwm Elan?
We were contacted this year by Dr Jenny Wong, a tree researcher from Bangor University. Jenny and her husband Bryan have set out to prove that Aspen, Populus tremula was widespread not only in the mountains of Eryri but also in other upland areas like Cwm Elan.
Aspen is easily recognised by its shimmering foliage and the fluttering sound of its leaves in a strong breeze is quite distinctive. The leaf stalks are flattened and flexible near the leaf blade, which is why the leaves flutter so easily. Young leaves are a coppery colour before becoming green, then turning a vibrant yellow before falling in autumn. This of course makes it easy to spot the trees from a distance at that time of year.
Aspens grow mostly in clonal colonies – a ‘mother’ tree gives rise to an often, large colony of genetically identical trees by means of root suckers. Each individual tree may live for 40 – 150 years above ground, but the root system of the colony can be long-lived, even for thousands of years.
Jenny believes that aspen forests were once an important feature in the Welsh uplands but that extensive sheep grazing over hundreds of years all but removed them, with only small, isolated colonies surviving on rocky outcrops. She believes there were distinct vegetation communities with perhaps unique assemblages of different plant and animal species that won’t easily be found in any scientific literature because the communities were inaccessible and therefore very hard to record.
Last year, Dr Tim Rich, whilst searching for English Whitebeams Sobus anglica (see September’s newsletter), recorded an aspen on Caban Coch. Jenny and husband Bryan scrambled up the crags here in September and re-found the ‘tree’ which was rather worse for wear on account of this year’s droughts. We had as a group earlier, with pointers from Sorcha Lewis and Dwr Cymru rangers, found colonies in Llanerchi Wood and elsewhere. It is possible that these other colonies were originally planted and so DNA sampling is perhaps the next step.
With a national pressure to plant more trees and forests and with climate change bringing fires and an increase in tree diseases and pests, there is a need to plant a greater diversity of tree species. There is also evidence that this year’s wildfires in North America and Canada barely touched aspen forests, that they show some sort of resistance.
It looks like we have another native species to plant (appropriately) in Cwm Elan and that we may in fact be reinstating aspen in the valley.
Fiona Gomersall
Ecologist
