Warwickshire News Mine

The official launch of the hunt will take place at the Spa Centre, Leamington on 9 March 2006. The results of the hunt should answer some these questions and help people to understand and celebrate the remarkable diversity of local trees.

The project has been dreamt up by Steven Falk, Senior Keeper of Natural History at Warwickshire Museum, a tree enthusiast for many years. It will run over 2006 and 2007.

Steven said:
“The Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull area is basically a huge arboretum, with over 350 different sorts of tree from every Continent. The county has examples of some of the finest specimens anywhere in the world such as the massive Cedars of Lebanon at Compton Verney and 800 year old veteran oaks at Stoneleigh Deer Park.

So much of our local tree information is not in the public domain and we need to fix that so that people can gain much more pleasure from them, study them and help protect the more important specimens”.

There is much work to be done and volunteers are required to help identify local trees and discover important specimens not yet known to Warwickshire Museum. To discover what information the Museum currently holds visit the Warwickshire RINGs web site at: http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/rings. This contains the latest draft catalogue of local trees, plus information on the more important local tree collections. You can also contact Steven at: stevenfalk@warwickshire.gov.uk, or by telephoning 01926 412481.

Many of the best collections are in public parks such as Leamington Spa’s Jephson Gardens, Coventry’s London Road Cemetery, Nuneaton’s Riversley Park, Stratford’s riverside gardens, Rugby’s Caldecott Park and Solihull’s Brueton Park. The Big Tree Hunt hopes to bring about improved labelling and interpretation of local trees and greater use of trees in education.

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Link to WCC