What this is
Barkline is a working tree-identification reference at aspenes.top. It holds 26 species dossiers across 11 plant families and 3 climate zones, and it grows as more are written.
Why a key and not a gallery
A photograph of a leaf will not identify a tree. Two species can have leaves that differ by a single vein pair, and a picture on a screen will not tell you which one you are holding. So this site is built the other way round: a three-step key comes first, the characters are written as things you can measure, and the figures exist to show you what the numbers mean rather than to be looked at on their own.
How a dossier is made
Each species is described under the same headings, in the same order: what it is, the leaf, the bark, the fruit, the habit and range, the four seasons, the five steps that separate it, what it is most often confused with, its wildlife value, and what specifically to record in the field. The four-season entries follow the temperate growing year — spring leaf-out, summer condition, autumn colour and fruit, and the winter characters that remain when everything else is gone — which is the sequence a reader actually encounters a tree in.
Every character is written as an observation rather than a claim: what to look at, at what height, in what light, and how the same tree may differ if it is shaded, coppiced or grafted. Dossiers are filed and published on a rolling schedule; a species that has been written but not yet filed does not appear anywhere on the site.
How the figures are drawn
No stock photography is used anywhere on this site. Every leaf outline is generated from five integers — the number of teeth along the margin, tooth depth as a fraction of the blade's half-width, vein pairs, aspect ratio, and petiole length as a fraction of blade length. Those five numbers are printed in the morphology table under each figure, so you can compare the drawing with the measurement, and compare one species' numbers with another's, without trusting the picture. The four-season marks beside the timeline use the same parameters recoloured by season.
What it is not
It is not a national flora and it does not claim to be complete. It covers the species that have been written so far, and a tree outside that set will not be identified by the key, however carefully it is read. It also does not replace a local expert for anything with a legal or safety consequence: statutory tree protection, protected species licensing and risk assessment of hazardous trees all require a person on site, not a web page.
Who writes it
Barkline is written and published by The Dendrology Desk, an independent editorial desk working on temperate and subtropical tree identification. Every dossier carries the desk as its byline and its filed date. Corrections are welcome and are acted on: write to [email protected] with the species, the character you think is wrong, and what you observed. A correction with a photograph and a location is worth ten without.
Contact
General enquiries, corrections and permissions: [email protected]. The canonical address of this site is aspenes.top.