Fail

A young tree at the bottom of the garden. Shady location. About three feet high. Leaves opposite, with each succeeding pair rotated a quarter circle. Buds black. Not very vigorous, probably not helped by being infested with a lot of small, white bodied spiders.

Now from time to time I moan about how useless the RSPB online bird identifier is. Starting out today, I thought that the tree identifiers on offer were rather better, but then changed my mind when the nicely organised key supplied by the Natural History Museum alleged that this tree was a spindle tree, which I am fairly sure it is not. Various other keys made other suggestions, but nothing that convinced.

Giving up online, I turned up my ancient short guide to trees, published by OUP and written by Oleg Polulin, actually something of a wow on flowers rather than trees according to his entry in wikipedia. Notwithstanding, he does at least offer quite a long list of trees with broad, deciduous & toothy leaves - but again, none of them convince. The service tree of Fontainbleu, for example, can have leaves of roughly the right shape but they are in the wrong arrangement.

All very frustrating.