Common trees of the UK, Part 1. (Oak, Hazel, Ash, Silver Birch, Horse Chestnut , Beech)

Hey, welcome to UK Wild Crafts. So if you're into foraging or hiking or wild camping and you spend any amount of time in the forest then I think it's a really good idea to get to learn the trees around you because it can make the woodland feel a lot more like home if you can just go out identify trees and see if there's any uses for you like edibility or making fire or shelter. So first of all behind me is an English oak Quercus roba which is a very common tree in the UK. It can grow anywhere up to nearly 40 meters although it actually in its old age can get shorter so it makes it less likely to be knocked over by the wind and will prolong its lifespan. The bark of the oak is a greyish brown colour and it has very deep ridges. The fruit of the oak is the acorn which sits in the egg cup base. The leaves are fairly easy to recognise, they've got undulating lobes and their image is used on the logos of both the Woodland Trust and the National Trust. The two most common species of oak that you're likely to find in the UK are this one here the English oak Quercus roba and the Sessile oak Quercus betraea. So the way that we tell that this one is an English oak is we look how the leaves are attached to the stem. So this one here has very short leaf stems attaching it to the main branch and the English oak acorns will have a long stem whereas Sessile oak is the complete opposite. The leaves will have a long stem and the acorns will have a short stem. Acorns are edible but they're usually far too bitter, they need to be processed to remove the tannins so they need to be crushed, soaked in water and then the tannins leached out that way and that needs to be processed several times to make them edible so I don't think the the amount of effort is worth the reward. Also the timber of oak is used a lot in building because it's very strong. Hazel is a very common native tree, usually one of the smaller trees found in the woodland. It's got quite distinctive long straight stems that all come upright from the base. Sometimes it has one main central trunk with lots of smaller stems coming from it, sometimes it's like this where they're all fairly small. So the bark is usually light gray or a bit brown and on the larger older stems the bark is often peeling away. The leaves grow alternately down the stem, the leaves are rounded with a point at the end and they are doubly toothed so you've got the larger serrations and in between those you've got smaller teeth. The leaves are fairly soft to the touch and that's because they've got a downy fur underneath and also the the leaf stems are furry as well. In winter you'll see the distinctive male catkins. The fruit of the hazel tree is of course the hazelnut which has to be in my top five wild edibles. They usually mature in early September but you have to be very quick to beat the squirrels to them. The hazel branches or stems are very useful in crafting because it's very pliable, very bendy, they can be used in weaving baskets. If you want it a little bit thicker like that sort of whip, they're good in building fences, wattle fencing I'll use that for, and also for if you've got grown tomatoes you can use them as canes for growing the tomatoes up. This is common ash Fraxinus excelsior which sounds like something out of a Harry Potter book. It's one of the most common trees in the UK and can grow up to 35 meters. The bark on younger specimens can be quite smooth, on older ones it's quite ridged and you get a network of crisscross patterns on the bark. In the winter it's quite easy to tell by the twigs have the buds on which are quite a dark black and it flowers before the leaves open. The leaves of the ash tree usually appear quite late in spring, they're usually one of the last trees to come into leaf. The leaves are serrated and they're compound leaves which means many leaflets per stem. There's usually between 9 and 13 per stem and they grow in opposing pairs and then one terminal leaf. The fruit of the ash tree are these ash keys. They are edible but only when very young, the greener the better and they do need to be pickled. You'll find absolutely loads this time of year in May on ash trees. So ash is quite a useful hardwood and many crafters use it for the handles of making tools especially axes. When you find dead ash there's a very good chance that you'll find a fungi on there. It looks like a little black dome that's called king alfred's cake it grows almost exclusively on dead ash and you'll see the concentric rings when you cut it in half. Now this fungi is really good for fire lighting. If you take a spark onto the fungi once it's dried then it's really easy to get a fire going and you can also carry an ember just keep blowing on it and you can carry the ember with you when you're changing camp so you can easily set up a new fire. Silver birch has to be one of the easiest trees to ID in the winter because of its distinctive bark which is silver with black striations running horizontally. As the tree gets older it develops diamond-shaped fissures in the bark and as it gets older still the base of the tree gets darker brown and rugged. Silver birch has both male and female flowers or catkins. The male ones in groups of two or four and they're long yellow catkins that that hang from the tree and then female ones are smaller and green and stand upright and if you look around they're usually forming around April time and here are the the ones that have died and fallen off the tree. They'll be all around. I'm in May now so they're not on the tree anymore but all around the base of the tree there's loads of them. The leaves of the silver birch are small fairly triangular shaped and toothed. Birch bark is really useful for fire lighting because it contains oils which are highly flammable. Someone here has been cutting it off the tree which I generally don't do because it can damage the tree. It's actually much easier to collect it from dead fallen bits of birch and I think it works better as well so yeah don't go cutting it off the tree. You can also collect birch sap from birch trees in early spring which gives you a nice healthy drink. It's a bit like mineral water but tastes a bit sweeter. You can often find also birch polypore fungi growing on dead or dying silver birch trees which is a very useful mushroom to find. You can use it as a plaster if you peel off the the pores on the underneath of the mushroom. You can also grind it down to use it for fire lighting and it's also used for sharpening blades as well once it's been sliced and dried. So if you're into bushcraft, silver birch is a very useful tree to know. This is horse chestnut, a large non-native tree that can grow to about 40 meters and will often live for about 300 years. The bark when it's young is usually quite smooth and greyish. When they get older the bark goes darker brown and a bit scaly. They're flowers in May. The flowers have four or five white petals that go pink at the base. The fruit of the horse chestnut are conkers and they develop inside a green spiky case in autumn. The buds are a brownish red and they're sticky. The leaves are palmate. They usually have five to seven leaves that radiate out from the central stem and the leaves are tubed. So conkers aren't edible but you can use them if you cut them up and dry them. You can use them as a laundry detergent and the leaves as well you can also use if you crush up the leaves and add a bit of water you can use them as a hand soap and that's because they contain saponins which is like a natural form of soap. Beech is a large native species can grow above 40 meters. Its bark is smooth and grey and can develop shallow fissures with age. If you see carvings on the bark there's a good chance that you've got a beech tree because it's got nice smooth bark. People like to carve their names on it. The fruit of the beech tree are beech nuts also known as beech mast and it's another good way of identifying the tree. If you look at the base of the tree and dig around in the leaf litter you'll find the discarded shells or casings of the of the beech nuts. So beech leaves have a rounded oval shape and the margins the edges of the leaves are wavy and when they're young they have really fine hairs but as they get older they lose those hairs and go a darker green. When they're this age when they're still a little bit translucent they're nice and edible and they make a good substitute for lettuce. Another way to tell it's a beech leaf is it has usually around nine pairs of veins that grow diagonally down the leaf. The budding arrangement of the beech are alternate so you'll get leaves on one side of the branch then the other and then the other alternating up the stem. Beech trees like to grow on free draining soil so if you're in an area that has a lot of beech trees like this here then there's a good chance that you're in a chalk or limestone area. Thanks for watching UK wild grass. If you haven't already you can subscribe here.