This grant was awarded to Coille Alba for an Aspen Flowering study to explore the factors which affect the reproductive performance of Scottish aspen. Expanding aspen woodlands has been challenging in the Scottish Highlands as aspen only infrequently flowers and sets seed. Consequently, nurseries have primarily relied on vegetative propagation to produce planting material, which is not ideal from both genetic and economic perspectives.

This project was undertaken due to the growing interest in the role of aspen for biodiversity and its potential as a timber crop. The authors hoped to shed light on what influences flowering, by studying seed orchards where trees are subjected to streesful situaitons to encourage flowering and by grafting scions from clones that willingly flower in the wild.

Outcomes

The resulting report provides a summary of the data and recommends further observation. In 2019, a further grant helped to set up two seed stands.

There has been a resurgence of interest through projects such as SCOTLAND: The Big Picture’s Painting Scotland Yellow project which we also part-funded in 2023.