Sycamore deserves a place in the countryside

Another Life: The growth of young trees can astonish you from one year to the next, even when you've reared them from seedlings (rather, I imagine, as with teenage sons, except that they don't suddenly burst out in spring in an extra six sizes of gear).

The beech we snatched up as a babe in Cong Forest demands this year that I reroute a nearby hedge; the sycamore that arrived on the wind and dared me to hoe it away is now an awesome waterfall of leaves, extending its cool, dark shadow across the lawn.

Both trees are, of course, blow-ins to Ireland - naturalised rather than native species. Beech may have come in with the Normans, sycamore perhaps a lot earlier, from the mountains of southern Europe - long enough ago, anyway, to insinuate itself into the folklore of money-trees and holy wells.

Both are abundant, sometimes dominant, in our remaining fragments of native woodland - a recent survey of the south-east found sycamore in three-quarters of them - and the more absolute conservationist dogma is that they must be ruthlessly cut out as "invasive canopy species". Unlike, say, ash and oak, they can indeed cast a canopy shade in which some plants find it hard to thrive: the special, cathedral majesty of a planted upland grove of beech can owe much to relatively bare ground beneath. And the profligate vigour of self-sown sycamores, springing up in city gutters and rural churchyards, has earned it the reputation of a weed.

Irish woodland ecologists are ready with examples of native woodland, especially on fertile ground, in which the zestful growth of beech or sycamore seedlings threatens to outcompete regeneration of native oak, hazel or ash. The team that surveyed the south-east for the National Parks and Wildlife Service a couple of years ago were strong on the impact of such "infestation". But they granted that "attitudes towards these species vary among woodland managers and ecologists". They could have been thinking of Thomas Pakenham's recent reference to "some modern ecologists [who] advocate a kind of ethnic cleansing in which naturalised species, such as beech, are systematically hunted down and destroyed". He would have approved of one forester I know who, charged with restoration of an ancient oakwood, could not bring himself to fell a splendid grove of beeches but nailed bat- boxes to them instead. The "invasive" sycamore, on the other hand, is being methodically snuffed out in many millennium woods.

How useful is sycamore to wildlife? Wordsworth's "seat beneath the honeyed sycamore, where the bees hum" was a tribute to the gorgeous, nectar-rich racemes of flowers that hang from the tree in early spring. It takes over from the oak in its peak population of aphids, providing food for birds, insect predators, ants and bats. Its leaf litter is prodigious, supporting high numbers of earthworms and other soil creatures. It matches oak and ash in hosting epiphytic lichens and mosses and, in dying (after some 200 years) is consumed by teeming invertebrates and fungi.

Living sycamores have been no less good for people. Rooting deeply and proof against salt winds, they have crouched over homesteads on stormy Irish coasts and hills where no other tree would survive. And given space and proper nourishment in open fields inland, they can make imposing specimens in old age. It is no surprise at all to find some of them, along with beech, quite high in the roster of Champion Trees, just published by the Tree Council of Ireland and featured on this page last week. In this copiously illustrated booklet*, the champions - for height, girth, age or whatever - are selected from some 7,500 trees recorded and measured in recent years throughout the island.

Most of the absolute record-holders, predictably, are conifers brought in from overseas and planted for spectacular appearance or performance - towering and massive sequoias, cedars, cypresses and firs. But the oldest trees in Ireland are four native yews that could well be between 700 and 1,200 years old. And along with impressive oaks, the county-by-county lists of remarkable trees offer a 40m ash in Tipperary, a Co Kildare crab apple at 14.5m and a willow in Kilkenny almost six metres round.

As for Acer pseudoplatanus, the champion for height is a 29.5m sycamore at Shelton Abbey, Co Wicklow. But the real mark of age is a big (sometimes hollow) belly: seven metres round in "Bishop Bedell's Tree" at Kilmore Cathdral, Co Cavan; more than eight metres for the billowing sycamore at Gormanston College, Co Meath. Whatever the fate of sycamore as an invader of native woods, it merits a chance at majesty as an adopted child of the open Irish countryside.

* Available from the Tree Council of Ireland: trees@treecouncil.ie