The Celtic broadleaf forests cover most of Great Britain and Ireland, spanning England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and the Isle of Man within the Palearctic realm. Sessile and pedunculate (English) oak dominate the woodlands, mixed with birch, ash, holly, yew, and hazel, while humid western fragments form an Atlantic temperate rainforest where oaks are richly festooned with lichens, mosses, liverworts, and ferns. The climate is strongly oceanic, bringing frequent rainfall, high humidity, low sunshine, and rare temperature extremes. Today the ecoregion is in critical condition: the great majority of its original forest has been lost to agriculture and fragmentation, leaving only scattered ancient woodland amid rolling pasture, and it harbors a remarkable group of endemic whitebeam trees, several of which are critically endangered. For gardeners, native genera such as oak, birch, holly, yew, and hazel are well suited to cool, wet, maritime conditions.

At a glance

About the temperate broadleaf & mixed forests biome

Four-season forests of deciduous hardwoods — oak, maple, beech — often mixed with conifers, shaped by warm summers and cold winters. Trees leaf out in spring and color in autumn; the generally fertile soils have made these forests heavily settled and farmed.

Catalog plants suited to this ecoregion

Computed from each plant's stated USDA zone range against this ecoregion's CHELSA-derived current zone range, with the CHELSA mid-century warming delta applied for the projection. Plants whose stated range falls outside both the current and projected zone end up dropped; the rest land in one of the three buckets below.

Collections for this ecoregion

No curated collection's plants all fit this ecoregion's zone range. We surface a collection only when every member would grow here — partial fits get filtered out rather than mislead. As the catalog and the curated set both grow, this section will fill in.

Related ecoregions