Yew, Juniper our only truly native gymnosperms
Trees have taken a bashing since Christmas with storms Brendan, Ciara and Dennis following on each other’s heels in quick succession. To add to their problems, the high levels of rainfall resulted in saturated ground conditions making life even more difficult for these giant plants.
Trees are like oversize books. Books are arranged on library shelves by topic: all the crime novels are grouped together in one section while the cookery and travel books are located in other areas. Everything is neat and tidy and organised except when it comes to oversize books like a coffee table art book too big to fit on a standard shelf. Big books end up on an outsized shelf of their own with cookery, travel, art, and other diverse topic all sharing the same space for no other reason than that they are too big to be accommodated with the rest of their kind.
Trees comprise a completely artificial group of giant plants that belong to diverse plant families and bear no relation to one another other than the very obvious fact that they are all extra tall.
That said, all trees do fall into two distinct groups: those that bear flowers and have seeds contained within a fruit like apples and pears, and those that don’t have flowers and have uncovered seeds often borne on the scales of a cone like spruces and pines. The latter group is called the gymnosperms or conifers.
‘Sperm’ is the Greek for ‘seed’ and ‘gymno’ is the Greek for ‘naked, so the gymnosperms comprise all the plants bearing naked or uncovered seeds, that is, seeds not enclosed deep inside a fruit like those of an apple but exposed on the scales of a cone.
We have only twelve species of gymnosperms in Ireland and they are all trees or shrubs: three firs (European Silver-fir, Noble Fir, and Douglas Fir), two spruces (Norway Spruce and Sitka Spruce), two larches (European Larch and Japanese Larch), three pines (Scots Pine, Lodgepole Pine and Black Pine), Yew, and Juniper.
Of that small group of twelve gymnosperms, ten were originally planted for forestry, shelter, or decoration in estates. However, they managed to escape from ‘captivity’, establish themselves in the countryside and become naturalised.
Only two of the twelve are truly native: Yew and Juniper. The jury is still out on whether any Scots Pines are descendants of the original post-glacial natives that now appear to be extinct or whether they are all derived from imported stock.