Irish native trees: the 28 species and one clue for each

Where Ireland's list differs from Britain's

Ireland's list is shorter than the 45 trees on the Woodland Trust's British list, covered on our UK native trees page. The trees that make the difference are worth knowing, because they are common in Irish parks and estates.

On the British list but not the Irish one: beech, hornbeam, the three limes, field maple, wild service tree, the English, field and Huntingdon elms, black poplar, box, dogwood, Plymouth pear, the buckthorns, Midland hawthorn and bay willow. Wych elm is the only elm on the Irish list. National Museums Northern Ireland's native or introduced page names beech, sycamore and lime among the trees deliberately introduced to Ireland.

On the Irish list but not the British one: the strawberry tree, and white willow. The Woodland Trust gives white willow's origin in Britain as non-native, while the Tree Council includes it among Ireland's 28. The two bodies draw the line differently for this tree; neither is a field mark you can see.

Brought in by people: the Tree Council names beech, sycamore, horse chestnut, spruce, larch and fir.

The strawberry tree, Ireland's odd one out

The strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo) grows wild in Ireland but not in Britain. The Tree Council's profile describes a small evergreen that can grow into a forest tree up to 15 m in Ireland. Its clusters of white flowers open in November and December, and because the fruit takes 12 months to ripen, ripe fruit and new flowers hang on the tree at the same time in late autumn and early winter.

It grows mainly in Co. Kerry, especially around Killarney on lake islands and shores, with smaller populations in unshaded parts of Glengarriff Wood, Co. Cork, and around Lough Gill, Co. Sligo. The Tree Council says it is thought to have spread over the land bridge from Brittany rather than through Britain like most Irish natives. Some botanists have asked whether it was brought by people instead, and National Museums Northern Ireland does not list it among the trees native to Northern Ireland, so a strawberry tree in a Belfast garden was planted.

What you actually see in Irish woods

Native trees are a minority of Irish forest. The National Forest Inventory 2022, reported by the Irish Farmers Journal on 5 April 2023, put total forest at 808,848 ha, 11.6% of the land area. Sitka spruce, a North American conifer, covered 44.6% of that forest area, down from over 50% in 2007. Broadleaves, mainly native, covered 218,060 ha, about 27%, and birch alone had nearly doubled to 58,030 ha.

So in a conifer plantation the spruce is not native, while a birch in the same wood may well be. In hedgerows, hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel are natives on both the Irish and British lists; hawthorn and blackthorn are separated by flowering time and fruit on our hawthorn vs blackthorn page.

Lookalikes on the Irish list

• Sessile vs pedunculate oak. Look at the stalks: sessile oak has stalked leaves and stalkless acorns, pedunculate oak the reverse. Our English oak vs sessile oak page has the full test, and hybrids are common.
• Silver vs downy birch. Feel the young shoots: downy birch is fuzzy, silver birch is not.
• The willows. Goat and grey willow are the commonest; white willow is the tallest, up to 25 m, with silvery leaf undersides. Eared willow is the least familiar of the four; separating it from grey willow is a job for a botanist with a hand lens.
• Rowan vs whitebeam. Both are Sorbus with red or orange fruit, but rowan leaves are divided into leaflets and whitebeam leaves are single, white-felted underneath.