In the Lake District earlier this month I took the trouble to seek out a yew tree celebrated by Wordsworth.

“The pride of Lorton’s vale,” the great poet called it. He observed it standing “single in the midst of its own darkness… of vast circumference and gloom profound this solitary tree!.. of form and aspect too magnificent to be destroyed”.

Still solitary, the tree is in Lorton village, directly behind a former brewery that now serves as the village hall. But when Thomas Packenham was researching his wonderful book Meetings With Remarkable Trees, published in 1996, the host at his bed-and-breakfast in the village knew nothing of it. At Cockermouth, where the Mayor’s chair is made with fallen wood from the tree, the person who showed him the precious relic was unaware the tree still existed.

Things are better now. An attractive information panel quotes the poem and points out that half the tree has been ripped off in a storm since Wordsworth’s day.

Huge branches still piled underneath help to suggest its former size.

Wordsworth also immortalised a quartet of other Lakeland yews – what he called the “fraternal four of Borrowdale.” Packenham also found these trees neglected. “I had the feeling, as I did at Lorton, that no one particularly cares for these famous trees,” he commented. Happily, they are now fenced off, and it is worth the short scramble up the fellside near Seathwaite to pay homage to them.

All these yews are estimated to be around 1,000 years old. But there are many yews far older. A specimen believed to be 2,500 years old, at Runnymede, where it remains a living witness to the sealing of Magna Carta, is among the ten trees shortlisted by the Woodland Trust to be crowned Tree of the Year, on which public votes are invited.

The Trust confines itself to native trees. But shortly after visiting the Lorton yew I came across another outstanding Lakeland tree. It’s a larch near Aira Force, massive in height, girth and width, with its lower limbs virtually trees themselves. This must be one of the earliest larches planted in Britain, where they were introduced in the 17th century. I wasn’t alone in photographing the giant.

Wordsworth hated larches. He wrote: “As a tree it is less than any other pleasing.” He disliked the tree’s shape and colouring, especially its “spiritless unvaried yellow of autumn.” And yet the larch is now regarded as a characteristic Lakeland tree.

It seems unfair, perverse even, that introduced species of tree, branded “aliens” by the Woodland Trust, are not considered worthy of the Tree of the Year title. The National Trust, too, seems no more than lukewarm about foreign trees. Its Studley Royal parkland at Fountains Abbey is distinguished by many magnificent sweet chestnuts – the species whose deeply furrowed bark twists appealingly, like barley sugar. Most are well past maturity, but the Trust does not seem to be replacing those that die. Nor indeed their horse-chestnut cousins, one by one vanishing from around the lake.

Of the 600 or so varieties of tree found in Britain, only about 35 are native. With one of the best climates in the world for growing trees, the honour of becoming Top Tree should be open to all.