I have long thought that it would be great to have a tree to represent every county across Britain. Have your say in an online survey.
A tree for every British county – click to take the survey
I’m sure that we would all have different views as to what tree should represent a county. Some may be obvious, others more obscure:
- the last of our mature English Elms to represent East Sussex
- sweet apple for Herefordshire
- rowan for Dyfed
- Scots pine for Grampian
- pear for Gloucestershire
- Sitka spruce for Northumberland …?
Maybe these are too obvious, so why not have your say? I’ve created a simple online survey using Survey Monkey called A tree for every British county.
To keep it simple the survey allows users to select just one tree for a county at a time. Feel free to take part in the survey as many times as you wish, selecting a different county each time though please!
I have ideas for using the results in a couple of novel ways and will publish the results here of course. I’ll keep the survey open for a while with the hope that this will attract more interest.
Photograph (low quality) of a completed drawing by Sarah Simblet for The New Sylva:
Small-leaved lime (Tilia cordata)
Photograph (low quality) of a completed drawing by Sarah Simblet for The New Sylva: Field Oak (Quercus robur) and rooks.
We wrote recently about a visit to a forest in Wales to make one of the last treescape drawings for The New Sylva (read more). While we were on location Gabriel Hemery set up a camera and during the course of six hours took 600 photographs of Sarah Simblet at work with a view to making a short time lapse film.
It is one year until The New Sylva is published in April 2014 and several milestones have been reached.
Gabriel Hemery has finished drafting the manuscript; before editing the word count stands at 125,000 words. Sarah Simblet has completed more than two-thirds of the drawings with just 60 (out of a total of 200) to go before the ultimate deadline of November, when the book goes to print.
Regular readers will know that the authors have been searching for the best example of a venerable ash tree in Britain to feature in The New Sylva (read the story).
Yesterday we visited the chosen ash tree. It is growing in the ancient deer park at Moccas in Herefordshire, among dozens of other ancient oak and sweet chestnut trees.
