Conifers
25 February 2010
Conifers; a bit of a rant.
Some years ago, the nursery was paid a visit by members of the British Conifer Society. Among their number was Aljos Farjon, who headed the temperate section of the Kew Herbarium and chairs the Conifer Specialist Group of IUCN, the World Conservation Union. World expert as he was on all facets of conifers in the wild, he had had very little to do with conifers as garden plants. Standing surrounded by our conifer sales display he made it pretty clear that he didn't much like what he saw.
Where we, as horticulturalists, were seeing colourful variants that would be popular in our customers gardens he saw sickly individuals lacking in chlorophyll. Where we saw dwarf forms posessed of great charm that were sure to be popular with owners of small gardens he saw mutant forms doomed to elimination by natural selection but rescued by us for no good reason that he could see.
Years later, in a chapter called "Conifers In and Out of Fashion", in his book "A Natural History of Conifers", it becomes clear that the moment was one when both of us had our eyes opened to a completely different way of seeing a group of plants with which we were both intimately familiar, but from very different viewpoints.
Being the good scientist that he is, Farjon goes on in the book to reflect on aspects of the biology of conifer cultivars, such as why some conifer species appear to be much more likely to produce mutations than others.
For my own part, I started to pay more attention to the various species of conifers that grow wild around the world.
What a fascinating subject it is! What a diverse group of plants, in size, shape, growing requirements and every other way. Most gardeners will be aware of the Wollemi Pine, discovered in 1994 in the Wollemi National Park near Sydney, Australia. It was hailed as the "botanical find of the century" and described as a living fossil. In truth there were several similar finds of conifers in the twentieth century, notably Metasequoia glyptostroboides, that are every bit as much living fossils as Wollemia.
Conifers as a whole are evolutionary relics. They had their heyday in the Cretaceous, 145 to 65 million years ago and have been under pressure from the generally more successful flowering plants ever since. Consequently a high proportion of conifer species are rare in the wild and often at severe risk of extinction. Even species that are common in cultivation, for ornament or utility, may be threatened in the wild.
Think about it: the location of Wollemi Pine in the wild is a closely guarded secret, not least because the park authorities are afraid of someone introducing a root pathogen like Phytophthora cinnamomi that might wipe out the species, which probably has evolved no resistance to the disease. If it did happen though, the species is well established in cultivation and could be reintroduced once the infection had been eradicated or to a nearby cleanlocation.
Conifers need friends like never before. All sorts of pressures are being brought to bear on species that are already struggling to survive. In the nursery business, at least in this country, conifers are out of fashion. That probably doesn't matter in itself, the range of conifers in the garden centre includes very few true species such as would be found in the wild. What I do worry about though is that it is becoming acceptable, even de rigeur, to not like conifers at all. I would hate to see that play out into less effort going into conserving a wild habitat because what was under threat was a conifer not a flowering plant. I suspect this is pretty general: that it is easier to get people exercised about a threat to a rare orchid than to a rare moss for example.
I think the opposite is also true. If people value conifers in their gardens and in the gardens they visit, they start to take an interest in them and to find out more about them. Then there is a good chance that the extraordinary conifers of New Caledonia, the oddities to be found in Tasmania or New Zealand or South America, even the three species native to our own small island, will have their survival chances boosted.
The other asset that this country has and is in danger of not recognising, is a large number of collections and plantings of non-native conifers from around the world. A great many conifers find the conditions in Britain, especially down the western seaboard, much to their liking. The very many huge conifers to be found close to the western coast of Scotland would be grounds enough to visit the area, even if there were not many other reasons to do so. The time will come when the trees start to decline and need replacing and I would hope that the anti-conifer brigade are not in the ascendant when that time arrives.
I count myself very fortunate to have visited the Redwoods in California and the remains of the Kauri forest in New Zealand. The avenue of Giant Redwoods at Benmore and the Monkey Puzzles flanking the drive at Bicton rate almost as highly. I'm not sure what it is that people are looking for in their gardens these days but if an echo of the wild, a sense of the age of the world, a certain rugged simplicity, an assertion of independence in the face of fashion's pressure; if any of these are part of it for you then you probably should go out now and plant a conifer.
