Tree of the month

Lime in West Meadow

One of the great pleasures of walks round Watlington is seeing the lime tree when you enter West Meadow. Magnificent in summer, it also has charms in winter. The many bundles of vegetation in its branches are mistletoe. Mistletoe has spread widely in the last few years – some of us have noticed its appearance in our gardens – and there is a very interesting story as to why.

It turns out that mistletoe seeds are spread by birds, particularly blackcaps and mistle thrushes that are able to deal with the sticky berries. You can recognise blackcaps because they are about the size of robins and have, yes, a black cap on their heads (females wear brown). Having ingested berries they move on to perch elsewhere and clean their beaks on the branch on which they land to remove any seeds that have stuck to their bills. The seeds then stick to the branch, germinate and grow to the distinctive clusters you see in the photo.

Blackcaps have increased in numbers in recent years and this increase in numbers has led to the spread of mistletoe. To lure them to your garden you could try hanging a bunch of mistletoe outside your kitchen window. Not only can you hope to see blackcaps, but in a few years, you may find mistletoe growing naturally on a tree in your garden In his 2022 report for the Parish Council Martin Gammie described our tree as ‘late mature’ with a residual life expectancy of more than 40 years.

The report is available at www.watlington.org/neighbourhood-plan.html. References to our tree can be found using Ctrl+F – our tree is T9.

Richard Sibly

If anyone would like to share a story about a tree or group of trees that mean something to them or would like to join our tree group, we would love to hear from you.

Fiona Danks – fionadanks@gmail.com