THE CANOPY
Most of us can recognise a tree when we see one. That sounds ridiculous, but what I mean is that we tend to stop there.
Tree.
Maybe oak if the leaf is obvious. Holly if it has berries. Something evergreen if we don't know what else to call it.
People once needed to know much more than that. The tree could tell them what timber they had, whether the wood would bend or split, whether the bark was useful, whether there would be nuts or fruit later in the year, whether animals would feed beneath it and whether it was worth protecting.
Around Killarney there are still woods where some of those relationships are visible if you know what you are looking at. The old oak woods are dominated by sessile oak with holly underneath. Reenadinna is something different again, a yew wood on limestone. Where the ground becomes wetter, alder begins to make more sense.
This guide isn't asking you to learn every tree in the forest. We will start with a handful worth knowing and look at the things that make them easier to recognise — the leaves and bark, but also the flowers most of us never notice, the nuts, berries, fruit and seeds that turn up at different times of year.
This is not a foraging guide
Some of the things in this guide have histories of being eaten or used as medicine. Some are poisonous. Some have edible and toxic parts on the same tree, which is a fairly good reason not to experiment.
Do not eat anything you identify from this guide.
And if you find fruit, nuts, flowers, bark or fallen branches in the woods, leave them where they are. What looks like a spare acorn to us is food for something else, or perhaps the beginning of another tree. Fallen timber, seeds and fruit all belong to the woodland before they belong in our pockets.
If you find a beautiful cone, nut or strange piece of bark, the temptation is to take it. Leave it. You will probably forget about it in the bottom of your bag anyway, and whatever is living in the wood has more use for it than you do.
Take the photograph. Leave the tree to get on with being a tree.
Look at it again in another season
A tree you think you know in August can look completely different in February. Flowers appear before leaves on some species. Catkins hang where you never noticed them before. Fruit may be obvious for only a few weeks. In winter the bark and shape of the branches suddenly matter much more.
So don't worry if the feature in the photograph isn't there when you arrive. The absence is part of identifying it too.
SESSILE OAK
Quercus petraeaThis is the tree that makes much of the old Killarney woodland feel like Killarney woodland.
In the better-developed oak woods the canopy is almost entirely sessile oak, usually with holly underneath. It is easy to walk through that and think you are looking at something untouched. You aren't. These woods have been worked, cut, grazed, burnt and used for centuries.
Oak was valuable because almost nothing about it was wasted. The timber was strong. The bark could tan leather. Acorns fed pigs. Around Killarney, oak was also cut heavily for charcoal used by the local iron industry. The surviving wood is not a museum piece. It is what remained, recovered and kept growing.
How to recognise it
Look for the familiar lobed oak leaf, but notice the leaf stalk. Sessile oak leaves have a more obvious stalk than pedunculate oak. The acorns are the easier clue: “sessile” means sitting, and the acorns sit almost directly on the twig rather than hanging from long stalks.
What turns up through the year
Leaves usually begin appearing in spring. The flowers are easy to miss: the male flowers hang in yellow-green catkins while the tiny female flowers sit much closer to the twig. By autumn the thing everybody recognises has appeared — the acorn.
YEW
Taxus baccataYew is easy to turn into myth because it is old, dark, evergreen and often found in churchyards. Around Killarney we don't need to invent anything. Reenadinna Wood on the Muckross Peninsula is already extraordinary — roughly 25 hectares dominated by yew, the only significant stand of yew woodland in Ireland and one of the remarkable yew woods of western Europe.
The wood itself was valuable. Yew is hard, close-grained and difficult to work well, which made skilled yew-working a trade in early Ireland. It was important enough to be counted among the old “Nobles of the Wood”.
How to recognise it
Dark evergreen needles, narrow and flat, usually lying in two rows along the twig. The bark is reddish-brown and flakes away in thin patches.
What looks like a berry isn't really a berry
Female yews produce bright red fleshy cups called arils around a seed. They stand out against the dark needles and they look inviting.
STRAWBERRY TREE
Arbutus unedoA strawberry tree in Kerry sounds as though somebody brought it home from a holiday and planted it beside a lake.
But this tree is part of the strange botanical story of southwest Ireland. Its natural distribution is strongly associated with the Mediterranean and Iberia, yet it also occurs around Killarney. It is one of the plants that makes people talk about the Lusitanian element in the Irish flora — species with an odd southwest-Ireland connection that doesn't fit the simple idea that everything arrived here through Britain.
How to recognise it
It is evergreen, with tough glossy leaves and reddish-brown bark that can peel to show warmer cinnamon colour underneath.
Flowers and fruit at the same time
This is the part worth looking for. The flowers are small, pale and bell-shaped. The fruit slowly ripens through yellow and orange into red, with a rough strawberry-like surface. Because the fruit takes a long time to mature, you can sometimes see flowers and mature fruit on the same tree.
The fruit has a history of human use. That is interesting history, not an invitation. Leave it for the woodland.
HOLLY
Ilex aquifoliumHolly tends to get reduced to Christmas, which is a bit unfair considering what it is doing for the rest of the year.
In Killarney's sessile-oak woods it is the characteristic understorey tree, happy in shade beneath the taller canopy. It was useful enough in early Ireland to be classed as one of the Nobles of the Wood, with wood used for things that needed strength and a smooth finish.
How to recognise it
The glossy evergreen leaves are obvious, but the prickles are not as reliable as you might think. Lower leaves, within browsing height, tend to be much more heavily armed. Higher up a mature tree the leaves can become noticeably smoother.
The flowers are easy to miss
Before there are red berries, there are small white flowers. Holly trees have separate male and female plants, so berries only develop on female trees when there is suitable pollination nearby.
ROWAN
Sorbus aucupariaRowan looks delicate beside oak, but it turns up in places where tougher-looking trees sometimes struggle. You will find it in woodland, on rocky ground and higher up the hills.
It also carries a ridiculous amount of folklore for a relatively small tree. In Irish tradition rowan was associated with protection and with supernatural danger, especially around May. We don't need to decide whether any of that was “true” to understand what it tells us: people noticed this tree, remembered where it grew and attached meaning to its red fruit.
How to recognise it
The leaf is made of many narrow toothed leaflets arranged along a central stalk. In late spring and early summer, broad clusters of creamy-white flowers appear. Later they become the orange-red berries that make rowan much easier to spot from a distance.
Who is actually eating the berries?
Birds. Thrushes in particular make good use of them and then carry the seeds elsewhere. A rowan growing somewhere improbable may have started with a bird sitting there long before you arrived.
There are old culinary uses for rowan berries, but raw fruit and seeds are not something to experiment with. We are not foraging here.
DOWNY BIRCH
Betula pubescensBirch matters partly because it is willing to arrive early.
When open ground begins returning to woodland, birch is often among the first trees back. Its light seeds travel easily and it tolerates poorer, wetter ground. The shade beneath it is light enough for other plants and young trees to establish, so something that looks like a thin stand of birch can be part of the beginning of a much more complicated wood.
How to recognise it
Downy birch has grey-white bark, usually duller and less papery than silver birch. The young twigs and leaf stalks have fine hairs — hence “downy”. The leaves are small, toothed and more rounded at the base than silver birch.
Look for the catkins
Birch flowers do not look much like flowers. The male flowers hang in catkins. Later, huge numbers of tiny light seeds are released and carried by the wind.
You don't need to collect the bark to feel it or peel pieces away. Look at the lenticels and the markings on the trunk and leave the surface intact.
ALDER
Alnus glutinosaIf the trees change, look at the ground.
Alder likes wet feet. Around Killarney it becomes important in wet woodland and around lake edges where the soil stays damp or is seasonally flooded. Its roots also work with bacteria that can fix nitrogen, which helps it live in ground other trees find difficult.
How to recognise it
The leaves are dark, rounded and often look as though somebody has taken the very tip off them. In late winter and early spring, long male catkins hang from the branches. The female flowers become small woody structures that look surprisingly like miniature cones and can remain on the tree after the seeds are gone.
Why people cared about wet wood
Alder is relatively soft, but it lasts unusually well when kept wet. That made it useful for things such as trackways, waterside structures, vessels and foundations. Cut alder also changes colour towards reddish-orange, which probably helped some of the stranger stories about the tree survive.
HAZEL
Corylus avellanaHazel is one of those trees people have probably seen all their lives without necessarily knowing they were looking at it.
It is often more shrub-like than grand, with several stems rising from the base. That made it useful. Hazel responds well to coppicing — cutting stems low and allowing the plant to throw up new straight growth — so the same stool could keep producing flexible poles rather than being used once and gone.
Look very closely in late winter
The long yellow male catkins are obvious. The female flower is not. It is tiny: a little red tuft emerging from what otherwise looks like an ordinary bud. That tiny thing is where the hazelnut begins.
Then come the nuts
Hazelnuts were valuable food for people in prehistoric Ireland and the shells turn up at archaeological sites in large quantities. Hazel was useful for wattle, trackways and all sorts of flexible work as well, and early Irish law ranked it among the Nobles of the Wood.
Sometimes the trees tell you that too
You will also find woods around Kerry where the trees are all roughly the same age, planted at similar spacing and perhaps all the same species. That is a very different woodland history from the old oak woods around Killarney.
It doesn't mean nothing lives there, and it doesn't mean the trees have no value. It simply tells you that somebody planted this wood for a reason, often within living memory.
We will come back to that when we have properly identified the trees around a future MACALLÚ stay. There is no point deciding they are all “pine” because they look coniferous from a distance and then building a story around the wrong tree.
A tree was not just scenery
Early Irish law ranked trees according to their usefulness and value. Oak, hazel, holly and yew were among the trees given the highest status, the so-called Nobles of the Wood. Damaging somebody else's valuable tree could mean a serious penalty.
That makes sense once you stop seeing woodland as background. A tree could be a roof, a boat, a fence, a bowl, charcoal, animal fodder, leather-making material, nuts for winter or years of future poles from a coppiced stool.
We tend to walk through a wood and see trees.
They often saw what the tree could do.
Pick one tree
You don't need to remember eight Latin names.
Pick one tree you didn't know before and find it again somewhere else. Look at the leaves. Look underneath them. Look for flowers, fruit, nuts, catkins, buds or the remains of last season. Then look at the ground beneath it and see what else is using the same space.
Once you recognise one tree properly, the wood becomes slightly less anonymous.