The trees on Ashmore Park are both loved and in some areas a source of complaint.

Yet trees are often just taken for granted by most of us. It is trees that clean the air we breath, it is trees and their roots that create soil stability, they also reduce  noise by absorbing traffic noise, and then dulling it. They also are used to ‘suck up’ excess water and reducing flood risk.

We have all sorts of trees on Ashmore Park and across Wednesfield North.

Trees are also important for our wildlife , birds in particular. Every time we lose a tree we affect the local wildlife. Now its also true that we have to ensure that trees are healthy and unaffected by disease and pests. There has been a reconition that an increasing number of diseases are affecting trees in the UK.

Ash dieback alone has affected millions of Ash trees in the UK.

Trees within the Ashmore Park itself are a great resource, and there is a huge number of variety to be found there. You may not know but there is a line of Common Oak (Quercus robur) in Ashmore Avenue, Griffiths Drive and Kitchen Lane that appear to be over 100 years old and the thoughts are that these trees were part of the old field boundaries.

Inside the park (The Ashmore Park) our tree population is of a mixed age and species

The park was constructed when the estate was built back in the 50’s; there are a massive 427 mature trees on The Ashmore Park site that may have been planted when the park was first established and the remainder have been planted since that date.

A further note of interest that due to the wet nature of this site, it would appear that a number of trees were planted on the parks perimeter; this may have been done to dry the site and reduce the risk of flooding (the park is higher than adjoining land on the south and west side of the park).

There is 60 trees that belong to the Common Lime species and there are 60 trees that are Grey Alder. Whitebeam is represented by  44 trees. 37 Poplar trees and 32 Horse Chestnut trees. They are the biggest varieties in the Park. According to the Forestry Commission, black poplar is the most endangered native timber tree in Britain. We have 37 of these trees in our Park! How about that then!

We also have  2 Silver lime (binomial name Tilia tomentosa) it is a species of Tilia native to southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia, from Hungary and the Balkans east to western Turkey.

One of the varieties of trees we have is one of the giants of the tree World – Red Cedar – Thuja plicata is a large to very large tree, ranging up to 65 to 70 m (213 to 230 ft) tall and 3 to 4 m (9.8 to 13.1 ft) in trunk diameter, exceptionally even larger Trees grow in North America! In short you can see rather than Ashmore Park having just boring old trees! In fact we have a marvellous set of tree species that the City of Wolverhampton should be proud of!

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Phil Bateman

Phil Bateman is Married to Mary and lives in Wednesfield North. He was a long serving local politician having served previously on the now defunct West Midlands County Council... read more

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