Winter is just around the corner but quite a few of our street trees seem determined to wear their colourful autumn cloaks for as long as they can. This stunning liquidambar, standing outside Ken’s Fish Bar on Half Moon Lane, has to be the pick of the month. Pictured on a dark and stormy evening in late November, its leaves graduate from green on the lower branches through yellow and orange to crimson at the top of the crown.
Over in Stradella Road, outside nos. 4 and 6, are these twin Redspire pears (Pyrus calleryana Redspire). They’re cousins to the narrow, upright Chanticleer pears that we see on most of the streets of Herne Hill, but with better autumn colour. In the second week of December their foliage was still largely yellow, but it should turn orange and red soon. The two other Redspires in the neighbourhood can be found on Wyneham Road.
Also on Stradella, just past no. 105 and almost at the corner of Burbage Road, is an Indian horse chestnut (Aesculus indica) whose elegant, pointed leaflets, hanging in fans of five, seven or nine, make a pretty autumn backdrop to the unusual-looking conkers.
Finally, a handsome Norway maple (Acer platanoides) just inside the railings of Sunray Gardens lit up Elmwood Road early this month with its glowing canopy of brilliant yellow.
Guy Barter, the chief horticulturist at the Royal Horticultural Society, explains why the autumn of 2021 has gone on for so long.
“Well, it's all down to temperature, and we’ve had a remarkably mild autumn so far,” he told the Today programme on Radio 4 in late November. “There’s been a bit of ground frost in southern areas, but by and large it hasn’t been terribly frosty.”
“Tree leaf fall is set by day length and the critical day length is 11 hours, which happened back in late summer. But once the trees are triggered by the day length, after that when the leaves actually fall is down to temperature and also whether there’s strong winds and gales.”
New trees on Half Moon Lane
The fiery sweet gum outside Ken’s has a new companion who’s just moved in next door: a freshly planted London plane (Platanus x hispanica) on the pavement by Budgens. There’s a second plane too, just over the other side of Holmdene Avenue, outside Splash dry cleaners.
This pair brings the number of trees planted so far in the 2021/22 season in our half of SE24 to seven:
Carver Road (between no. 57 and junction with Herne Hill): Japanese pagoda tree (Styphnolobium japonica)
127 Half Moon Lane (Budgens): London plane (Platanus x hispanica)
139 Half Moon Lane (Splash): London plane
9 Herne Hill: London plane
21 Herne Hill: London plane
31 Herne Hill (junction with Casino Ave): London plane
18 Sunray Avenue (grass verge): Sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua 'Worplesdon')
The council’s schedule indicates 20 more new trees arriving soon on our pavements. New pits for all of these were marked out in the first half of this month and some are already being dug, like the 10 on Winterbrook Road awaiting their Yoshino cherries (Prunus x yedoensis). There are also 16 other trees scheduled for planting on grassy surfaces that don’t require pits, mostly in the grounds of housing estates.
You can find details of all 36 of these locations on this website. But in addition we’re pressing for the council to deliver three trees that remain unplanted from last year’s programme:
A Himalayan birch (Betula utilis Jacquemontii) at the top of Elfindale Road, along the wall of 77 Herne Hill. The pit has been ready for months.
Two fruit trees on the grassy square outside 49-71 Sunray Avenue. Only one quince (Cydonia oblonga) was planted there in 2020/21, leaving residents waiting for the promised two almonds (Prunus dulcis) or an alternative species.
There’s also one relocation and replacement job that we’re calling on the council to carry out in the next few months:
A young London plane on Elmwood Road, at the rear of 1 Beckwith Road. The tree officers agreed that it was inappropriate for the site and a smaller tree will be planted there instead.
And we’d like them to replace these five mature trees that have died or been felled in the past year:
A rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) at 83 Casino Avenue. It’s not feasible to try to replant in the hedge where this one grew, so Casino residents would be happy to see the replacement go outside no. 112.
A Himalayan birch on Elmwood Road, at the side of 20 Wyneham Road. This was planted in spring 2020 but it didn’t thrive and was cut down in August this year.
A sweet gum at 45 Half Moon Lane that was felled in September after being seriously damaged in a storm..
A London plane at 25 Herne Hill, the junction with Casino Avenue. This tree was vandalised just a couple of days after planting at the beginning of November.
Another London plane at 101 Herne Hill, taken down in February. The stump has been removed and the pit paved over.
That makes a total of 52 trees from the council’s budget that we’re pretty confident of welcoming soon to Herne Hill. And that’s before we even get to the 30-plus trees that we’re expecting under the separate Tree Watch planting plan, funded by £17,000 worth of Cleaner Greener Safer (CGS) awards that we won in 2020 and 2021. As soon we hear of any developments on this front we’ll let you know.
More CGS applications
While we've been waiting for that decision, Paul's been busy putting together plans to raise more money for planting in the 2022/23 financial year. He gave a presentation to our local councillors at a December 8 'pitching meeting', where residents and community groups try to sell their ideas for environmental improvements.
Herne Hill Tree Watch has put in two bids under the CGS scheme, both for Casino Avenue. We're looking for £6,000 for six new magnolias at the bottom of the road, between Red Post Hill and Sunray Avenue, and £3,500 for seven trees further up the hill in the garden square outside the flats We’ll be up against dozens of other worthy projects and will find out in the spring whether we’ve been successful.
Planting planes a century ago
The new plane trees on Half Moon Lane are very welcome and will help restore the historic streetscape once they're fully grown, but in terms of numbers we’re probably still behind the Victorians and Edwardians. Laurence Marsh, the vice-chair of the Herne Hill Society, kindly shared with us some contemporary postcards that illustrate how much our forebears admired the London plane and how densely they planted them.
In this first card, postmarked 1912, Laurence pointed out some charming period details: the Thomas Tilling omnibus standing in front of what is now AK Food and Wines, a cart double-parked next to the bus bearing an advert for Nugget boot polish, and the premises of Martin N. Mitchener, an artificial teeth manufacturer, on the far left. No.5 Half Moon Lane, where he worked, now houses Oliver Burn estate agents.
In between Mr Mitchener’s place and the shop with the open awning next to him (presently Brockwell Park Pharmacy) we can see the first London plane in a column of six that once stretched along this parade of shops. None of these remains. In their place we have three Chanticleer pears (Pyrus calleryana Chanticleer) and one sweet gum. Across the road, where the postcard shows three planes, just one of the originals is still there.
One other interesting feature of this picture is the huge tree in the far distance, beyond the planes. This is the famous ancient elm that stood once in front of 50 Half Moon Lane and probably gave its name to Elmwood Road. William Harnett Blanch, in his 1875 history of Camberwell, wrote that it “must be several hundred years old, whilst its girth is not less than 36 feet. It is perfectly hollow, and as many as a dozen persons can find sitting room within its trunk.”
History doesn’t record how many dinner parties it hosted before it was sadly chopped down in the 1980s to make way for the Dulwich Mead flats.
Laurence has another card with a street view of Half Moon Lane taken in about 1925 at the point where it joins Carver Road, looking in the other direction, towards Herne Hill station. In this more residential setting there are five planes visible on the right-hand side, of which four remain. One was replaced in recent years by the sweet gum we mentioned above that was itself removed two and a half months ago.
One the left-hand side of the 1925 postcard three further planes can be seen before the junction with Winterbrook Road. The first two are still there but the third has been substituted by an elm, perhaps as a nod to the old elm we mentioned earlier.
It’s a smooth-leaved elm (Ulmus carpinifolia), a species grown for its resistance to Dutch elm disease. This species has the characteristic asymmetrical leaves of the elm family, where one toothed side extends further up the stalk than the other. The native English elm (Ulmus procera) was very widespread across the country before it was virtually wiped out by the Dutch elm beetles in the 1970s.
How old are those Half Moon Lane planes?
We reckon the original London planes shown in Laurence’s 1912 card are now about 125 to 130 years old. They would have been planted shortly after the shops were built in 1899/1900, about 120 years ago, but to get their actual age you have to add on the years when they were being nurtured in the tree nursery.
Keith Sacre, the sales director of Barcham Trees, one of Southwark’s main tree suppliers, explains that a big ‘standard’ street tree (on a clear stem) takes up to 10 years to grow before it’s ready for planting out. Even ‘whips’, tiny trees with almost no side branches, are a couple of years old before you buy them as hedging plants about 60 cm tall. The full piece is worth reading, but here’s an excerpt:
“The trees that tend to be planted in parks, woodland and green spaces – known as whips – are around 2-3 years old,” he writes. “You'll have seen these shorter, twiggy specimens being planted in parks, gardens, woodland, verges and roundabouts all over the place. By contrast, a street tree stands at 3-4 metres high, is between 7-10 years old, and has had a lot more care and attention lavished on it before it is planted.”
What are those railings for?
Finally you may have noticed shiny new black metal railings that have gone up next to a few of our street trees in the last few weeks. There’s one at 56 Burbage Road, another on sloping ground at the Half Moon Lane end of Ardbeg Road, a double set outside 6 Ardbeg, a single at 75 Beckwith Road and the last at 28 Elmwood Road.
They’re all London planes except for a sweet gum on Burbage, and what they have in common is massive roots that are crawling all over the kerb, like this tree on Ardbeg:
As Senior Arboricultural Officer Phil Barwell explained to us, “They have been installed to prevent trip hazards from the exposed roots, where there isn’t any other management option available to us such as Flexipave or root pruning.”
Flexipave is a flexible porous paving system made from recycled tyres. And root pruning - trimming back the roots - really isn’t practical once they’re this big.
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