The beautiful rowan is one of our most beautiful and colourful trees – with frothy white blossoms in spring, delicate feathered leaves, and colourful red autumn berries.

It’s also traditionally considered as one of most magical trees!

The name ‘rowan’ is thought to come from the Gaelic word ‘rudhan’ meaning ‘the red one’ – and/or the Norse ‘run’ meaning ‘rune’, ‘a secret spell or charm’.

The Gaelic ogham for rowan is ‘luis’ meaning ‘flame’, ‘herb’ or ‘great many’.

​Birch is one of our most beautiful native British trees and one of the most mystical!

Birch is often seen as a ‘pioneer tree’...

It was the first tree to start to recolonise the land after the last Ice Age and is, even now, often the first to start to grow on cleared lands or wastelands...

And it provides nourishment for the plants and trees that come after to allow the natural ecosystem to regrow.

​Because of this, birch is often associated with renewal and new beginnings.

Elder is one of our smaller hedgerow trees, growing wild in many places and self-seeding often.

It’s a tree that humans have used for thousands of years - and has a lot of folklore and superstition attached to it…

It’s thought that the name ‘elder’ comes from the Anglo-Saxon words ‘ellaern’ meaning ‘hollow tree’ and/or ‘aeld’ meaning fire, as the hollow twigs were used to spark a fire into life by blowing air into it.
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The Anglo-Saxons also used the words ‘eller’ and ‘kindler’ to refer to the wood of the elder, so we can see how the word ‘elder’ started to evolve.

The fern is one of our oldest surviving plants...

​Ferns were around even before the dinosaurs and date from the Mesozoic era (at least 66 million years ago).

The most common British wild ferns are:

• Male fern (Dryopteris filix-mas)
• Bracken (Pteridium aquilinum)

​But there are over 40 wild fern species including the Maidenhair fern and the Moonwort fern...