6. Newtown Black Poplar
One of the most remarkable trees in Wales now finds itself marooned in a car park.
Welcome to The Street Tree! This is the sixth in a series of pithy illustrated posts about great individual trees from Britain and Ireland. I’ll be posting at least one a week over the coming months.
The River Severn has been fixed by banks and walls, but the wonderful 350 year old Newtown Black Poplar is a remnant of a time when the river could meander freely along its broad flood plain. It might once have grown on the shifting silt, or have fixed a riverbank. Today it grows in a car park below a grassy embankment 30 metres from the river.
Species details
Black poplar
Populus nigra ssp. betulifolia
Where to find it
Heol Les Herbiers, Pool Road, Newtown SY16 1DH
///thigh.vets.opposites | 52.514325, -3.312079
Black poplar notes
Native black poplars can live for many centuries becoming huge and rugged. They are a subspecies only found in Britain, Ireland and north west France that would once have been common along watercourses. But as humans have increasingly intervened in the landscape they have now all but disappeared. There are thought to be just a few thousand individuals left in England and Wales (they are absent from Scotland), only a few hundred of which are female.
