What they said, Erika. Keep going.

Research question!

I suck at matters botanical. I lived in England for a year, more or less the same part of it my novel is set in, and all I could tell you about the trees was that they had all the expected tree parts. I did live in a city, if that's any excuse.

I'm writing a scene where the hero and heroine are so caught up in the passion of the moment that they have Spike-and-Buffy-in-Smashed style sex, only without the violent foreplay, in a convenient little copse of forest. I need a tree that would have a thick enough trunk to support the heroine and help her keep her balance, and one that's kind of sheddy, for lack of a better word. She should have bits of twig, bark, and leaves in her hair and stuck to the back of her riding habit at the end of the scene.

Susan, two trees that have peeling bark and might qualify as "sheddy" are birch and crape myrtle. I think birch is a New World tree, but you could search and see if it and/or the myrtle had been imported to England by the date of your story. Otherwise, you could search for indigenous evergreen shrubs and trees for your region of England, circa your story dates. Needles cling rather more than leaves would do, I think.

Hee. I justified the purchase of Brother Cadfael's Garden, a glorious coffee table book on medieval European herbs and their uses, as a research tool for my healer character.

So I try to learn them, from people who make out on the overnight shift, and eat tacos left in their cars overnight. But when they are with me, they are paid to recreate a place I think of as "America 1954". Where everybody likes meat with their breakfast, June Cleaver keeps surfaces clutter-free, and women like to be called "ladies".

DAMN, erika. You killer, you. Beyond evocative and fangs a foot long, too.

Susan, for some reason, the only trees coming to mind with the sheddy bark are decidedly not found in English gardens: eucalyptus and manzanita.

I suck at trees, unless it's figs.

Maybe I'll just not specify a type of tree and trust my readers to just believe me when I say she's got twigs in her hair and bits of bark and/or sap all over the back of her habit. (It's all to make sure she's looking really, thoroughly disreputable and disheveled when they walk out of the woods and realize they're not quite as alone as they thought, being as Lucy's bitchy cousin saw their horses tethered at the edge of the copse and was curious enough to investigate.)

(giggling)

Oh, my. Sap?

erika, your eye for the telling detail reminds me of Clyde Edgerton, who's one of my favorites largely because he can nail a sense of place or character with one pithy, gently biting phrase.

Oh, my. Sap?

If sap can be had--too bad they're not in the state of my birth, though I don't think any amount of passion would make me stupid enough to have sex against a loblolly pine.

But yeah, I'm trying to make it good and obvious what a nice little abandoned romp in the woods Our Heroine has been having, so it'll be a sufficient comedown from the sublime heights of sexual ecstasy to realize the bitch cousin all but witnessed it.

It almost makes me wish Lucy was mean enough to mentally go "HA-ha! In your face, coz!"

A few days later she more or less does, and not just mentally. Bitchy cousin is just married to an aging, rather stupid earl who badly needs an heir, and is miserably regretting it, and really quite jealous of Lucy. The cousins meet accidentally, bitchy cousin tries to twit Lucy for her common behavior, but Lucy realizes she no longer needs to fear her as she did when they were growing up, and says something like, "It appears to me that we have each made our beds, and now all that's left for us is to lie in them. I bid you a good day, my lady."

That was a very fun scene to write.