To cheer you up during your daily lockdown exercise we’ve got 13 beautiful new street trees to admire (well, they will be beautiful when the first leaves emerge in a couple of months). Southwark’s arborists and contractors have been busy over the holiday period and at the time of writing all but one of the new trees promised for this period have now been planted.
The tree department has a massive amount of work scheduled for this winter and early spring and we’ve seen many teams out doing maintenance work as well as planting. The number of new trees in their plan for this year is impressive, both in our streets and our local parks.
Here’s a street-by-street rundown of every sapling that’s been planted in Herne Hill since late November. Half of them are replacements for trees that have died in previous years.
Burbage Road
At no. 85 there’s a new addition to the growing cluster of ginkgos along the street. Ginkgo biloba seem to thrive on Burbage, where the wide roadway and deep front gardens give them the room they need to grow tall and healthy. Their unique fan-shaped leaves turn brilliant yellow in autumn and their geometric silhouette stands out in the winter months.
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Carver Road
Outside no. 1 there’s a new silver birch (Betula pendula), a familiar, fast-growing British native with a graceful outline. It will become a rich habitat for wildlife, with insects eating the leaves and small winter birds coming to feed in its weeping branches once it begins to fruit. Its white bark will gradually darken as it ages.
Casino Avenue
Casino has three new trees this year. At the top of the hill, on the corner outside 27 Herne Hill, stands a Ligustrum (privet), a relative of the humble privet hedge once so common in front gardens. Southwark plants five different varieties of privet and we’re not certain of the variety yet, but at first glance it looks like a Ligustrum lucidum, or Chinese privet, an evergreen with small black berries and creamy-white flowers that can stay on into the winter months.
At the other end of the road, at the crossroads with Red Post Hill, is a pair of aspens (Populus tremula), one outside no. 114 and the other diagonally opposite outside no. 115. The aspen, which bears catkins in spring, is another tall native tree, known for leaves that flutter and shimmer in the breeze (its Latin name means ‘trembling poplar’). There’s a lovely, tightly planted copse of aspens that’s worth visiting in Brockwell Park, between the lake and Brockwell Gate.
Elfindale Road
There are two new cherry trees at the top of the road, on the even-numbered side. Both are Prunus 'Sunset Boulevard', one outside no. 4 and one further up, on the stretch between no. 2 and the side of 79 Herne Hill. The Royal Horticultural Society describes Sunset Boulevard as ‘a narrow, conical, medium-sized, deciduous tree. It has coppery young foliage and good, orange-red autumn colour. The single flowers are blush white, opening in mid-spring.’
Elmwood Road
Another matching pair here: Himalayan birches (Betula utilis jacquemontii) on the pavement outside nos. 13/15 and 23/25. Elmwood has a good collection of these striking trees, which have the whitest bark in the birch family. They’re fast-growing and at this time of year the crown of the older trees will sometimes carry both male and female catkins. The female ones, last year’s dried-out fruit, look like little black cones, while this season’s male catkins hang in an inverted V or trident shape.
Hollingbourne Road
There are a couple of new trees for Hollingbourne too. At no. 25 is the street’s first Yoshino cherry (Prunus x yedoensis). Residents can look forward to a fantastic display of abundant pale pink blossom every March. At the bottom of the hill, meanwhile, between no. 57 and Warmington Road there’s a Himalayan birch, filling in a tree pit that’s been empty for a long time.
Holmdene Avenue
Between no. 96 and Half Moon Lane, just down from the stump of an old liquidambar, is a new Japanese pagoda tree, the seventh of its kind on Holmdene. The leaves are ‘pinnate’, meaning they’re made up of opposite pairs of little ‘leaflets’, like on an ash tree. Older pagoda trees will bear beautiful sprays of white flowers and strings of little pale-green fruit in pods. The commonly used Latin name is Sophora japonica but nowadays the botanists prefer Styphnolobium japonicum, even though it’s a bit of a mouthful.
Stradella Road
At the T-junction where Stradella Road meets Winterbrook, outside nos. 87/89, is a new tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera). Residents of Holmdene, Hollingbourne, Howletts, Beckwith and Burbage will be familiar with this tree, with its distinctive flat-topped, four-pointed leaves. Once it’s mature, in summer it will bear orange and pale green flowers shaped like tulips, and in winter seed-bearing fruits that also look like tulips, although ragged and dried out.
There’s just one tree from the council’s Christmas/New Year planting list that we’re still waiting for: a Prunus x yedoensis outside nos. 28/30 Winterbrook Road. The tree officer assures us it will be in place by the end of January. The amazing avenue of Yoshinos on Winterbrook already makes a spectacular floral show every March and we’re hoping for still more to fill in the gaps.
Don't forget there are 38 more street trees due to be planted in Herne Hill between February and May. That means there will be lots of watering work coming up, especially if we have another warm, dry spring.
Winter pollarding
In the last few weeks there has been some heavy pruning of London plane trees in Beckwith Road, Elmwood Road and Ardbeg Road, as well as several limes on Red Post Hill. Each tree takes several hours to prune so it requires a number of visits to complete the work for the whole street.
The London planes we’ve inherited were planted in long attractive avenues and valued for their ability to adapt to urban conditions, their resistance to pollution and their long life (often several hundred years).
In wide streets and parks they’re usually allowed to grow unhindered, except for the removal of dead wood, but in urban streets with narrow pavements and houses close by their growth needs to be managed. Mature planes can often block out light from houses, obscure vision for motorists and drop large branches on pavements and roads.
With plane trees, limes, oaks and other large broadleaf trees the pruning technique is pollarding, which involves the removal of the upper branches of a tree, leaving short stubs (sometimes known as knuckles) and reducing the size of the crown (the framework of limbs above the trunk). It’s a potentially dangerous job and can only be done by a team of highly-skilled professionals, among them the climbers you see in our photos.
Pollarding is normally done during the winter and looks quite drastic for a few months, but it stimulates vigorous regrowth from the stumpy branches so the trees quickly recover. If it’s done repeatedly it does give the planes a kind of lollipop shape, which not everyone likes, but it does tend to make them live longer by reducing the weight and the ‘windage’ (wind resistance) of the top part of the tree.
You’ll be aware that as well as encouraging the upper branches to regrow, pollarding also produces a crop of fast-growing wiry shoots at the base of the tree. These ‘epicormic growths’ soon spread across the pavement and into the road, but unlike the crown they can be easily cut back every few months.
Trimming off these basal growths with loppers, pruning saws and secateurs is one of our routine maintenance jobs at Herne Hill Tree Watch.
They quickly grow back on Half Moon Lane, where the planes have to be pollarded every single year to allow the buses to pass easily. But they should be easier to control on the side streets like Beckwith, Elmwood and Ardbeg, where pruning only takes place every few years. And on Sunray Avenue you won’t come across any basal growths at all because the planes there have never been pollarded.
Help with tree identification
Finally, if you’re out and about over the winter you might want to sharpen your tree recognition skills. There are lots of resources on the internet to help you, and we’ve put together a few suggestions:
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/british-trees/how-to-identify-trees/
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/media/48347/twig-id-sheet.pdf
http://paulkirtley.co.uk/2011/bark-buds-common-european-deciduous-trees-winter-identification/
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/how-to/identify-wildlife/how-to-identify-trees-in-winter/
The Woodland Trust even has a quiz to test how much you know:
If you’re keen to learn more you could try A Guide to the Identification of Deciduous Broad-Leaved Trees and Shrubs in Winter, by the Field Studies Council. It’s available at www.nhbs.com. Or you could get hold of a secondhand copy of Philip's Guide to Trees of Britain and Europe, which includes illustrations of winter profiles.
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