Branching out into trees

Most people are fairly happy to profess a struggle with grasses and sedges, but I have always had a blind spot for trees. Of course I can spy a horse chestnut or a sycamore or a decent handful of other commoner species. Beyond that, though, I've broadly bodyswerved them. This year it was time for that to change.

Last year in a nice bit of brownfield in the Bay I saw a set of quite attractive larger saplings which presumably have a parent somewhere around the place that had been planted. I had no idea what it was, though, and I didn't push too hard to find out. They like to grow in pavement cracks, apparently.

Yesterday, I decided I'd go and have a look at them. Having acquired Collins tree book - the simpler one in addition to the more comprehensive one I already had - I had browsed through and decided, sort of, that it might be a black poplar, with its pointy, cordate, leaves. I wasn't sure that the leaves were quite right, though, as I remembered them being more cordate than appeared in the pics.

To make a short story long, I ended up with a twig, having decided that they were fairly distinctive, and found that it definitely wasn't a poplar (buds way too blunt/round). It's the first use I've made of the winter twigs book in anger, and I was pretty pleased with its performance, both in keying and confirmatory images. Once I'd sussed it was Italian Alder (Alnus cordata) the other Collins books and google images quickly showed the leaf shape as the one I was familiar with. The species is known as widely planted and is naturalised in other places in Fife.

Hopefully this is the first of many tree discoveries of the year.