The Cut-Leaved Alder

On the lawn closest to the River Ouse, the Cut-Leaved Alder produces small woody cones through the whole of winter and reddish-purple catkins every spring, and its leaves are cut so finely they read as feathery rather than solid, moving differently in the wind than every ordinary alder nearby. That difference is why the Tree Register lists it as a Yorkshire county champion, one of six inside York Museum Gardens. Alders are river trees by nature, at home in the wet ground the Ouse leaves behind after York's regular floods, and this one has grown to ten metres with a trunk over a metre and a half round without ever leaving the damp lawn it was planted on. Decay has started at its base, the kind of slow hollowing that in most trees signals age rather than danger, and the Yorkshire Philosophical Society's original nineteenth century planting scheme is the likeliest source for a cultivar this particular. Standing at the garden's low point by the water, it is easy to see why this spot was chosen for it: alders do not just tolerate wet feet, they need them, and the Ouse has kept this one fed for the better part of a century and a half.