Autumn brings with it such change. Rain refreshes our gardens, air gets nippier coaxing cosy woollens out of storage, berries weigh down boughs in our shrubs and hedgerows and trees turn into fiery shades of ochre, umber and red before shedding their leaves into crunchy paths at our feet.
My favourite tree is a copper beech, which is no surprise as I live beneath Beechen Cliff in Bath, a wonderful beech covered escarpment with winding vertiginous wooden staircases ascending to breath taking views of the city framed through the serrated almond shaped leaves of these magnificent trees.
Gigantic London planes line our city streets and provide centre pieces for our public spaces, their wide palm like leaves rustling in the breeze. Silver birches are easily picked out with their pale peeling bark and slender profile and willows weep whimsically over our embankments and river side paths.
It’s difficult to ignore the changes of the seasons that trees exhibit so readily. That cheery feeling brought on by branches brimming with blossoms in spring, beckoning the lighter, warmer weather. Then comes the lush green leaves giving us shade and shelter and the joy of fragrant blooms in summer. The multicoloured woodlands mark autumn and the shedding to let the long, low sunlight through in winter. Trees don’t hold on to their flowers, leaves and fruits despite their beauty, instead letting go, so that a new cycle of life can be created year after year.
Trees as Habitats
A multitude of fauna inhabit the canopies, trunks and roots of trees from squirrels and birds to insects and spiders. Flora is abundant too, and it’s easy to spot fungi sprouting out from the lower parts of trunks coupled with mosses and lichen growing over branches and bark.
You may already be lucky enough to be able to watch wildlife enjoy the trees in your garden, but if you have a smaller space, it is still possible to keep trees in pots to bolster biodiversity in your outside spaces.
I keep two crab apples and an eating apple in large pots in the front garden area of my small Victorian terrace. They will reach about 7 metres when fully grown. It’s a wonderful sight to watch the first buzz of insects around the pretty
fragrant blossom in the Spring, and they lose a few leaves each year to hungry hungry caterpillars. Our local blackbirds feast on the small tart crab apples in late summer. They share company with two further large pots in the wasteland at the end of my road that host a Christmas tree and beech tree, both rapidly gaining height! No doubt after the busy acorn hoarding of a forgetful squirrel, there is also a baby oak growing in the flower bed alarmingly close to the front of my house that will need to be transplanted before it gets any bigger!
If you’re looking for a slender, beautiful tree that welcomes insects with its blossoms, and birds with its berries, a Rowan is a good fit. It can reach about 15 metres tall.
For those with lots of space, a silver birch is a wonderful choice – attracting hundreds of insect species with both it’s bark and leaves, and so providing some choice pickings for baby chicks. Woodpeckers like to nest in and feed from silver birches. These will reach a soaring 20 metres when fully grown.
Wild cherries can grow to similar tall heights, and their berries attract both wood mice and dormice as well as insects and birds. There are few trees more elegant than the wild cherry, which has a festival dedicated to it, where communities gather to enjoy its pink fragrant blossom together in parks and gardens in Japan. This communal act to welcome Springtime is known as ‘Hanami’ – or ‘the viewing of flowers’.
If you like to make a seasonal sloe gin, you will be familiar with the blackthorn, an English hedgerow regular. It flowers early providing some much needed nectar and pollen for bees at the beginning of Spring. They can grow within dense growth, providing shelter for its inhabitants and typically get no taller than 7 metres. Similarly, a Hawthorn with its distinctive spring flowers also provides a dense protective environment for nesting wildlife, though it can grow to about double the height of a blackthorn. Also happy in a hedgerow though can equally successfully thrive in the open, is the wonderful field maple. Aphids love its leaves – and ladybirds, birds and the humble hoverfly in turn, love aphids!
Underneath a prolific hydrangea, also in my front garden, a tiny little holly tree has sprouted. It perhaps came from a rogue berry eaten and redistributed by a bird. I am looking forward to it growing. A lovely evergreen tree that offers birds and mice shelter and food with its distinctive bright red berries throughout the winter. I use holly leaves around my vegetables in the spring and summer to naturally dissuade slugs and snails from getting close to my seedlings in the raised beds in my garden with quite a lot of success as long as I keep the spiky barriers in tact!
Trees for Food
It’s not just the more than human world that enjoy eating from trees of course. I am coaxing six tiny apples into fruition on my potted tree, that clearly needs to be moved to a larger pot after a healthy growing season this year. I have enjoyed apples, pears and cherries from trees espaliered against a garden fence in my previous home, the children barely able to wait for the fruit on the lower branches to ripen so they could munch on them. A mature cooking apple tree on my allotment, provided us with much entertainment, as different people brought home made contraptions designed to pick the apples from the heights of this substantial tree – an upturned lemonade bottle cut in half and affixed to a broom handle being my harvesting device of choice.
I have a fond childhood memory of a Victoria plum tree planted for me one birthday, that delivered the sweetest, juiciest fruits I had ever tasted that weighed the branches down just enough for me to reach them.
My daughter has a similar gift, a small hazel tree, again in a pot because there isn’t space in my garden to lay her roots in the earth. We are yet to enjoy cob nuts from the baby hazel, but our potted purple filbert, a red leafed variety of hazel, offered up a few nuts for us this year for the first time in three years, though the tree is still barely a metre and half tall.
I often wonder why there are not more fruit and nut trees in our parks and public spaces, as they could offer up free food for communities, are extremely good for biodiversity and are relatively easy to maintain and look after. In Cyprus, where my family descend from, this is common practice, and we wander the streets near my grandmother’s home feasting on figs so overripe their juice flows thick like syrup from the flesh when we bite into them. People carry empty bags out with them on their evening strolls to collect ripe lemons, apricots and peaches for their families, and use sheets of newspaper to protect their hands when picking prickly pears. The shared enjoyment of this common endeavour somehow makes the sunshine soaked fruit taste even better.
Trees for Climate Resilience
I am noticing a difference in the seasons compared to when I was a youngster – this summer was another very dry and warm one. You may also be feeling the increase in summer temperatures, and may be as shocked as I am at seeing pictures of wild fires in the UK, and the increased occurrence of extreme storms, and flooding around the world in recent years.
Trees have an important role to play in mitigating the impacts of climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Oaks and ash are likely to be resilient species for future environmental changes and for smaller options, crab apples can tolerate dry conditions.
Trees also have a role to play in helping us to adapt to climate change and increase our resilience to heat waves, droughts and storms by offering shelter and shade, stability for soils, and habitats for migrating species. Trees with dense foliage like a juniper are excellent to provide nesting spots and shade.
Some species contribute to creating better air quality by removing toxins from the atmosphere and others have the potential to reduce noise pollution by creating natural acoustic barriers. Conifers like our humble yew are effective because they use all the surface area of their many needles to capture urban pollution.
I hope you have been inspired to look out or walk amongst the trees in your neighbourhood, or maybe to seek out a small, multifunctional crab apple for your garden. The generous benefits of nature to both our health and that of our planet are ever present in our landscape’s gentle giants, our beautiful trees.
Photography by Funda Kemal
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Further reading and references:
Woodland Trust guide to best garden trees for wildlife
Cherry Blossom/Sakura Festivals
Simple Guide to Climate Change
Royal Horticultural Society Trees for Climate Change
(All checked for access 21.09.25)