Gardeners thinking of booking a holiday may now be poring over beautiful gardens they can visit across the continents.
But there are also some awe-inspiring trees to be admired.
Anyone visiting arboretums this year may wonder at everything from the mighty oak to the weeping willow, yet venture further from our shores and there are some amazing specimens with names as quirky as dragon’s blood, flame of the forest and quiver tree.
You may want to travel to Australia to see 90m-high mountain ash, or to the Sierra Nevada to admire the giant sequoias, or to Japan to see the stunning puffs of cherry blossom (sakura) appear in spring.
If you can’t decide where to go, help is at hand from Matthew Collins, garden and travel writer, and head gardener at London’s Garden Museum, who with fellow garden writer, Thomas Rutter, has produced The Tree Atlas, a coffee-table tome and guide to discovering the world’s most beautiful, unusual, majestic and colourful trees on your travels.
The book features 50 different tree species from across the world and not only do the authors describe the trees in detail, but they show you where and when to see each variety, how to get to the locations and how to identify them.
1. Dragon’s blood tree – Yemen
The national tree of Yemen is so called because of the deep red resin in its bark which appears to bleed when cut. Yet it is vital to the landscape, as its dense umbrella canopy provides shade and redirects moisture to the soil beneath, enabling other plants to grow.
The authors say it’s still possible to see the trees on the Yemeni island of Socotra, but you’d need to catch a flight from Abu Dhabi, and most people join a camping tour arranged from overseas.
2. Quiver tree – southern Namibia and northern South Africa
Most of us will have an aloe as a houseplant, but this strange-looking tree boasts the familiar long succulent leaves at the end of its bare branches, all supported by a peeling trunk.
It got its name from the indigenous San people’s practice of hollowing out the tubular branches to form quivers for their arrows.
Unsurprisingly the trees have a great drought tolerance and you won’t find them in conventional forests as we know them, but in stark, rocky landscapes in the hill of Namibia and South Africa.
3. Flame of the forest tree – southern Asia
The…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Independent Travel…