A tangled grove of rare, gnarled trees is hidden in an unlikely place on the sand banks of Formby.
Some 650 endangered black popular trees, making up 10% of the UK's whole population, are located to the south of Victoria Road car park - miles from their natural habitats along riverbanks in the Midlands and Southern England. Named for their distinctive ebony-coloured bark, the black poplar is one of the rarest trees in Britain, and provides a vital food source for the bright red larvae of the endangered goat moth.
Formby Civic Society member Dr Phil Smith, who carried out a survey of the poplars, said: "We looked at this history of these trees and were able to establish they were all more or less 120 years old. They were planted by the former estate - the Formby Point was once divided between two large manorial estates and they started planting pine trees in the 1880s, and had great problems getting them established because of the sandy dunes. They used the poplars as a sort of nurse crop around the plantations to protect them from the blowing sand."
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All 650 of the black poplars found at Formby are "males", and reproduce asexually when stems from low-hanging branches make contact with the soil.
Harriet Wilkinson, of the National Trust Formby, said it was "a mystery" how the grove had flourished over the years.
She said: "They are naturally found in riparian habitats and flood plains, but the drainage of these areas for agriculture has contributed to its decline. The timber was also significant for its uses such as floorboards and cartwheels, however this has been replaced by faster and straighter growing timber, and so the lack of demand for the timber has reduced planting. In addition, poplar species are prone to a variety of fungal diseases including cankers, leaf rusts and poplar scab."
Phile, a former ecology lecturer at John Moores University, said: "They naturally grow in damp, silty soils completely different from the dune sand they've been planted in here. They're pretty hardy, resilient trees. They're old and decrepit now, but they're still there.
"Of course, these trees have a limited lifespan. They're supposed to live about 200 years in their native areas. But here they are growing in sand, and battered by salt-laden winds, so I wouldn't expect them to live as long here. Some of them are over 130 years old, so we don't know how long they will last.
"They're very impressive visually. One historian who wrote about them in the past described them as having a rugged grandeur, which I think is rather good. Unfortunately, they don't do terribly well in suburban settings, so their population may continue to decline."
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