In the 1920s an amazing lady called Mrs. M Grieve was aware of this dying knowledge in Britain and collected much of the old wisdom about trees and herbs, compiling it into an incredible book called ‘A Modern Herbal.’ If you buy no other book I recommend this as it holds an encyclopedic amount of information and is a great reference book.

However, if you can’t identify the trees or plants, then it’s not much good! Some of the pages in this section will help with basic identification, but there are lots of field guides that are great to help with identification. The old Ladybird Book of Trees is great, as are the Readers Digest Book of Trees and Shrubs and many more out there. I would steer away from using the internet to identify, as I have often seen trees and plants incorrectly named on there. The only safe way is to use a site that specialises in trees like the Woodland Trust.

If you look at Uses of Trees, (in the Trees tab) you can click on the different posts to take you to information about each tree. I’ve initially chosen trees that were around in Mesolithic Britain and that feature in the Time Tree, but as time goes on I will add further trees that have lived here in more recent times.

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