The Black Poplar Project

The native black poplar is a one of Britain’s rarest trees, growing up to 40 metres tall and living for several hundred years. Once a familiar feature of floodplains, river corridors and wet meadows, it has declined severely as those wet landscapes have been drained and modified, and as forestry has favoured faster-growing hybrid poplars. Nationally only around 7,000 native black poplars survive; in Oxfordshire, an estimated 50 trees have been recorded. Without urgent action this remarkable tree could disappear from the local landscape altogether. Where they do survive, black poplars play an important role in healthy, wet floodplain landscapes, providing shade and habitat, supporting insects and other wildlife, storing carbon, and helping to slow and hold back water across floodplains.

The species faces a particular difficulty that makes ordinary tree planting insufficient. Almost all black poplars in Britain have been propagated from cuttings rather than grown from seed, and because replacements were traditionally taken from male trees, only around one in ten of the surviving population is female. Surviving trees are therefore often clones of one another, and with males and females rarely close enough together, natural reproduction from seed has been severely limited. Identification is a further obstacle: native black poplars are easily confused with the hybrid poplars widely planted across the country, so genetic testing is needed to confirm which trees are genuinely native before any cuttings are taken from them.

The Black Poplar Project addresses this directly. Working together, the Cotswolds Rivers Trust, Long Mead Foundation, the National Trust, Lower Windrush Valley Project and BBOWT have established the project with support from local authority partners. Funding from the West Oxfordshire District Council and Vale of White Horse Council has enabled the team to begin surveying existing trees, taking samples for eDNA analysis and begin planting out a few saplings of known origin in suitable areas. From mid-October the project launches a public fundraiser to help scale up this work and create a dedicated living library of genetically diverse black poplar to aid propagation and planting out. Contributions from local council partners will match public donations, and the project delivers a species action set out in Oxfordshire's Local Nature Recovery Strategy. Every contribution helps put these iconic trees back where they belong along Oxfordshire's rivers, floodplains and wet meadows so that future generations can enjoy and benefit from them.

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