Future Trees Trust researchers visited Cannock Chase with Forestry England to select birch plus trees for our breeding programme.
Plus trees are selected as outstanding examples of their species (excellent form, and trees that show greater growth than their neighbours). These trees form the basis of the breeding programme. We will collect graft-wood from these trees so that we can create grafted seed orchards. We will also collect seed this summer, to raise plants so that we can establish progeny trials to evaluate the genetic worth of each plus tree.
Seed arising from the grafted seed orchard falls in to the qualified category of forest reproductive material (FRM). The progeny trial will yield data on all plus trees so that we know which are the better and which are the worse trees in terms of form and growth. This data will be used to remove the poorer trees from the grafted seed orchard, so that the seed from the orchard moves from qualified to tested status – the highest category of FRM. Future Trees Trust are interested in producing seed that falls in the these two top categories of FRM.
We carry out the same work for silver birch, downy birch, sweet chestnut, sessile oak, pedunculate oak, wild cherry, and sycamore. Similar research and field work was carried out with ash, and had the first tested seed for any broadleaved species available in 2012, when ash dieback first hit the UK. Our ash programme is now focused on trees tolerant to ash dieback (the Living Ash Project)