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Why a few trees are worth knowing

Most of us walk past hundreds of trees a mile and register none of them. That is fine — a walk is not an exam. But learning half a dozen common species changes the texture of a route. A footpath becomes a sequence of landmarks rather than an anonymous green tunnel, and you begin to read the ground: where the soil is heavy and wet, where a hedge was last laid, where a wood has stood for centuries. Oak, ash, beech and hawthorn will cover most of what you meet on lowland and upland paths across Britain.

Work from four things in order: leaf, bud, bark and silhouette. Leaves are easiest but last only half the year. Buds are the most reliable winter clue of all.

Oak: the heavy, crooked heavyweight

Two native oaks dominate. Pedunculate oak prefers heavy clays and lowland woods; sessile oak takes thinner, often hillier ground. Both have leaves with rounded lobes and no bristle tips. Pedunculate oak leaves sit in tufts on very short stalks; sessile oak leaves have longer stalks, and their lobes run further down towards it.

• Leaves: rounded, wavy lobes with deep finger-like cuts, dark green above and paler beneath.
• Bark: grey-brown with deep vertical fissures and ridges, like raked earth, often creviced enough to hold moss, ferns and insects.
• Silhouette: broad, heavy and spreading, on thick, angular limbs. An open-grown oak is often wider than it is tall, with one or two lower limbs reaching almost horizontally.

Look for knopper galls on acorns in late summer — oak supports more invertebrates than any other British tree, so a veteran oak on a path corner is worth a slow look.

Ash: straight, grey, and identifiable by its buds

Ash is unmistakable in winter. Its buds are black, velvety and set in opposite pairs along the twig; no other common broadleaf gives you such fat, sooty buds. In summer, look for pinnate leaves: three to six pairs of serrated leaflets plus a single terminal one, all on a long stalk.

• Bark: smooth and grey on young trees, developing a diamond pattern of interlaced ridges on older trunks, sometimes with an "ogre's face" where branches have dropped.
• Silhouette: tall, slender and open, with upward-sweeping limbs and a narrow crown — gaunt beside the mass of an oak.

Expect dieback. Ash dieback has left many trees with thinning crowns and dark lesions on the trunk, and dead ash wood drops readily. Do not shelter under one in a gale, and keep clear of dying limbs over a path.

Beech: smooth grey trunks and silky leaves

Beech woodland is bright and clean, often bare underneath with a floor of mast and little else. The leaves are oval and glossy, with a fringe of silky white hairs around the margins when young, turning copper and rustling in autumn.

• Bark: smooth, pale grey, like elephant skin, often with faint horizontal lines and a dusting of green algae. Old carved initials are a giveaway.
• Silhouette: a dense, rounded, domed crown of fine twigs. In a beech hedge the dead leaves stay on through winter, which is a useful clue when you are following a boundary in January.

Copper beech, with purple leaves, is the same tree in a different colour form, common in hedges and parkland. Beech favours chalk and limestone, so downland woods are often beech-dominated.

Hawthorn: the hedge tree in May and every month besides

Hawthorn holds rural Britain together. It makes up much of our ancient hedgerows, marks old boundaries, and turns up in field corners where a footpath crosses a stile.

• Leaves: small, deeply lobed, roughly three to five lobes, dark green and glossy, growing in little fans on short shoots.
• Bark: shallow vertical fissures, grey-brown, often greened with algae.
• Thorns and fruit: twigs carry 1–2 cm thorns; red haws ripen from September.

The seasonal check settles it. Blackthorn flowers in March and April on bare black twigs, with sloes to follow. Hawthorn flowers in May, after the leaves are out, in flat, slightly musty-smelling sprays of white blossom.

Fieldcraft for the path

Train your eye by standing still. Look at the crown against the sky, then the bark at eye height, then the buds. Cross-check the ground beneath: oak leaves and acorns, ash keys, beech mast and hawthorn haws all gather under their parent trees. A hedge of old hawthorn and hazel with a huge, spreading oak at the corner usually means the line has been there a very long time.

Then walk it well. Hedgerows, verges and field margins are somebody's livelihood and somebody's habitat. Keep to the line of the right of way, close gates behind you, use the stile or gap rather than an improvised route through a hedge, and leave the trees as you found them. Learn the common species and every walk becomes a richer, better-observed piece of country.