Manchester's soot killed its old trees. What came through the nineteenth century did it out in the villages the city later swallowed, so this list is short on veterans and long on rarities: a laburnum in Didsbury whose branches flower yellow, purple and pink because it is two plants grown into one, limes in a suburban park that the city's own tree survey calls nationally important, an Amur cork tree doing far better than it should this far north. The survivor among them is a black poplar in Gorton, the tree that took the city's name.
0 of 5 visited in Manchester
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The Manchester Poplar
Black Poplar (Populus nigra subsp. betulifolia) · Gorton
Britain's most endangered native tree is named after this city, and this is the specimen people come to see. Black poplar took the nickname Manchester poplar because it did the one thing almost nothing else managed here in the industrial century: it kept growing in the soot. Coal smoke and acid rain took the trees out of the city centre. The poplars stayed.
Nobody knows how old this one is. Both sources that describe it say so outright, one of them calling its age a complete enigma, and the only hard number anyone has is the trunk: 4.07 metres round, measured for the Woodland Trust and quoted identically by both. It carries a Tree Preservation Order, and in 2023 it went onto the Woodland Trust's shortlist for UK Tree of the Year.
It stands in Annie Lees Playing Fields in Gorton, a public park about twenty minutes on foot from Gorton station. One thing to know before setting off: a younger black poplar carrying the same nickname grows in St John's Gardens in the city centre, and the two are confused constantly. This is the Gorton tree, the old one. The pin marks the park rather than the trunk, so allow a few minutes of looking once you are through the gate.
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2
Adam's Laburnum
Adam's Laburnum (+ Laburnocytisus 'Adamii') · Didsbury
One tree, three colours of flower, and a nurseryman's accident from 1825 behind all of it. In that year the Parisian grower Jean Louis Adam grafted a purple broom onto a common laburnum, and instead of the graft simply taking, the join itself started sprouting shoots built from both plants at once. What grew is a chimaera: a single tree with two identities running through it, propagated ever since from that one plant. Some branches flower laburnum yellow, some broom purple, some a dull pink that is neither.
Manchester has one, in Didsbury, and the council's tree survey lists it as a champion in the Tree Register of the British Isles, which keeps Britain's record specimens. Didsbury Civic Society, describing the walled Parsonage Gardens beside the Old Parsonage, calls it a very rare example of early bio-engineering that still survives, which is a fair description of a plant that has been quietly outliving its own novelty for two centuries.
Nothing dates this particular tree, so it earns its place on rarity rather than age. Go in late May or June. Out of flower it is a small, ordinary-looking tree with a remarkable story, and in flower it is the only thing in the garden anyone looks at.
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3
The Amur Cork Tree
Amur Cork Tree (Phellodendron amurense) · Didsbury
Either Manchester has the tallest Amur cork tree in Britain, or somebody's tape was wrong. The council's tree survey calls this one a glorious specimen standing at 55 feet, which is 16.8 metres. The tallest Phellodendron amurense on the national record stands at Forde Abbey in Somerset and measures 14.90 metres. Both cannot be right, the two figures may simply have been taken in different ways, and nobody has been back to settle it, so this page states the disagreement rather than picking a winner.
What is not in dispute is that the tree is a surprise on its own terms. Phellodendron amurense comes from northeast Asia, reached Britain in 1885, and is generally reckoned to need the south of England to do well. This one is in a Didsbury botanical garden, doing well. It is named for its bark, which is thick, deeply ridged and corky enough to give under a thumb.
One caution. The council's survey is the only source we could find that names this tree, and it does not say where in Fletcher Moss it stands, so the pin is the garden rather than the spot. The garden is small, free and open in daylight, and a tree of that height in it is not hard to find.
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4
The Variegated Green Ash
Variegated Green Ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica, variegated cultivar) · roughly 120 years, planted around the turn of the 20th century · Whalley Range
Alexandra Park holds over seven thousand trees, and this is the one a specialist stops at. The council's survey calls it a very rare tree, planted at the turn of the 20th century, and a potential champion, which is the surveyor's own careful wording: a possible national record-holder rather than a confirmed one. That planting period is the only date anywhere on this page, and it puts the tree at roughly 110 to 135 years, a generation younger than the park it grows in.
Green ash is a North American tree, planted in Britain as an ornamental. The variegated form is the uncommon part: leaves that come out marked and streaked with cream rather than plain green, so the whole crown reads paler than the trees around it, which is how you pick it out at a distance.
Alexandra Park opened in 1870, sixty acres of Victorian municipal park between Whalley Range and Moss Side, and it is still a working local park rather than a collection. The survey does not say where in those sixty acres the ash stands, and the pin marks the park. The Friends of Alexandra Park run tree walks and will know the exact tree, which is the shortest route to it.
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5
The Crimean Limes of Fog Lane Park
Crimean Linden (Tilia x euchlora) · Didsbury
The survey's own words are that these huge specimens are of national importance, and the word doing the work is the plural. There is more than one, they stand together in a suburban park in Didsbury, and the man who wrote that sentence, Owen Johnson, wrote the Collins Tree Guide. Nobody has counted them in print, nobody has measured them in print, and nobody has dated them.
So this entry is the group, because the group is what a visitor goes to see. Crimean lime is a hybrid, planted across northern European cities for a practical reason: it drops far less of the sticky honeydew that makes a common lime a bad thing to park a car under. It is a street tree in most places. Reaching a size worth calling nationally important is not what it usually does.
Fog Lane Park is free and open in daylight, an ordinary local park in south Manchester with an unusually good set of mature trees in it. The pin marks the park rather than the limes, because no source places them within it, and one source is all there is. If you walk it, tell us how many there are and where they stand. Nobody appears to have written that down.
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