The first week of July saw the council’s contractors still out planting trees that should have been in place by the end March. Now, in the second week, we find ourselves in the midst of the first real heatwave of 2022, with temperatures up into the 30s. It’s terrible timing for saplings, putting them under immediate heat stress and potentially drought stress before they’ve had a chance to establish themselves.
We’ve checked the planting records for the 2021-22 season and out of the 50 new trees in Herne Hill 31 went into the ground between April and July. That’s nearly two-thirds of the total new stock. We have to be extra-vigilant in making sure they all get the water they need. Fortunately, this season there’s much more evidence than in recent years of regular watering by the contactors’ teams, which we welcome. But we still need to look out for any neglected and suffering trees, including those planted in 2020 and 2021.
Heat and shade
You might have noticed in the past few days how cool and comfortable it is walking underneath trees rather than in the blazing sun on treeless stretches. Along Herne Hill, for example, stroll past the parade of shops between Elfindale Road and Frankfurt Road and you’ll feel the temperature immediately drop several degrees in the shade of those four relatively small London planes. Trees on the pavement will cool down your own house too and make you grateful you’re not sweltering in your front rooms.
As the summers get inexorably hotter year by year, perhaps we need to be thinking more about the amount of shade provided by the tree species we select. That doesn’t mean sidelining climate adaptability, biodiversity and ornamental features, just perhaps bearing in mind the advantages of a denser leaf canopy or a wider spread as well.
Recent arrivals
Since our last report on June 18 there have been six additional plantings:
Delawyk Crescent, opposite nos. 98-99, on the grass verge beside the perimeter road: an American lime (Tilia americana 'Redmond') planted in the last week of June
Elmwood Road, opposite nos. 28/30, adjacent to 20 Wyneham Rd: a hibiscus (Hibiscus 'Resi') planted June 25, replacing a dead Himalayan birch
Herne Hill, on the front lawn of the Pynnersmead estate: a Japanese pagoda tree (Sophora japonica) planted July 1
Herne Hill, on the pavement build-out in front of no. 25: a red horse chestnut (Aesculus x carnea 'Briotii') planted in the first week of July, replacing a vandalised London plane
Stradella Road, opposite no. 105: a common hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) planted in early June, replacing a dead nettle tree
Sunray Avenue, near no. 49, at the front of the open space by the pedestrian crossing: a common medlar (Mespilus germanica) planted June 26-28, replacing a dead ash.
Still unaccounted for are three more trees scheduled for planting in 2021/22 - all of them on grass, not pavement:
A fruit tree in Delawyk, in the middle of the estate, on the lawns outside either 56-57 or 77
Two fruit trees on Sunray, in the open space opposite the junction with Casino Avenue.
We’re chasing the council about these missing trees. But for now, let’s take a closer look at some of the newcomers.
The Sunray medlar
The most fascinating and unusual tree of all the most recent plantings is a common medlar (Mespilus germanica) on Sunray Avenue. You’ll find it at the front of the big open space opposite the junction with Casino Avenue, just by the pedestrian crossing. It’s quite a tall young tree and is already bearing a crop of small fruit, though not enough to make a decent photo yet.
The medlar has a list of qualities that potentially make it a very useful street tree. It tolerates heat and pollution, resists pests and diseases, requires only low maintenance, shades the pavements below its dense, umbrella-like crown and provides nectar for bees and other insects. It doesn’t need pruning, even if you’re growing it for the fruit. And it’s interesting all year round: big white, solitary flowers in late spring, glossy dark green leaves that turn red, yellow, orange and brown in the autumn and greenish-brown fruit that persists until winter.
But it’s rarely planted on the street. Apart from the new tree on Sunray, there are a few near Herne Hill but they’re all on parkland. There’s one at the far corner of the Dulwich Orchard, on Gallery Road next to the Old Grammar School, and half a dozen more growing at the orchard in Dulwich Park. You’ll find them directly opposite the boathouse at the side of the perimeter road, just past the tennis courts if you’re coming in from Dulwich Village, all hung with prolific quantities of fruit.
The nearest big medlar, though, stands in Brockwell Park, near the Norwood Lodge entrance, directly behind the splendid stone tank erected by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association.
It’s really worth a look next time you’re in the park. The flowers will all have gone by now, but in the photo you can see the five green fronds, known as sepals, that surround them as they develop. These sepals continue to encase the growing fruit, giving it an alien, sci-fi appearance, and if you peer down between them you’ll see the dark brown fruit itself with its five-pointed star.
If you want to see medlars in a more urban setting you’ll have to take a 68 or 468 bus to the first stop after Camberwell Green and from there make your way along the appropriately named Medlar Street. There you’ll come across five well-established and thriving medlars in a straight line, although that’s just half the number that were growing there some 15 years ago.
Medlars aren’t native to Britain, but they’ve been here since Roman times, cultivated for their extraordinary fruit - extraordinary not just in its appearance, like a cross between a russet apple and a rose hip, but for the fact that it’s hard and inedible until it’s almost rotten. You can leave the fruits on the tree until they’re sweetened and softened (or ‘bletted’) by the first frosts. Or you can pick them in early winter and store them in sawdust or straw for a few weeks before eating.
Some people might be put off by the mushy brown flesh of the bletted medlars but until the middle ages at least they were highly valued because they were the only fruit available in winter. You can find lots of recipes for medlar preserve online.
The Elmwood hibiscus
Hibiscus are usually grown as garden shrubs but the few hardy species work well as trees. They’re valuable as pollinators, highly decorative in the summer, flowering long after most of our local trees, and very compact, making them useful on narrow pavements. The tiny newcomer on Elmwood seems to be thriving, thanks to regular watering, and after just a few weeks has already put on an impressive display of trumpet-shaped lilac-pink flowers in a pit previously occupied by a sadly short-lived Himalayan birch (Betula jacquemontii).
Hibiscus are unusual as street trees in London but this latest arrival is the fourth in Herne Hill. There’s another at 31-33 Beckwith Road, planted in 2018, that we’ve featured before and two more in the Delawyk estate alongside no. 45.
One of the Delawyk pair is particularly vigorous and decked with flowers despite leaning at an alarming 30 degrees. It’s probably helped by its position against a warm, sheltered, west-facing wall. It’s buzzing with hungry bees at the moment, flying in for the sweet nectar and crawling out covered in pollen grains. Its neighbour a bit further along the same wall isn’t quite so healthy, though.
The Delawyk Tibetan cherry
Literally around the corner from the hibiscus, on the lawn between 44 and 45 Delawyk Crescent, is a new tree where the bark, rather than the flowers, fruit or leaves, has the starring role. It’s a Tibetan cherry (Prunus serrula), grown for its lustrous, copper-coloured stem.
The Delawyk tree is tall for a sapling, but its trunk - just 3cm in diameter - is still too spindly to do justice to the bark. Finding another Tibetan cherry nearby to photograph isn’t easy though. It’s not an uncommon tree by any means, but the closest group we could find is in Kennington, between blocks of flats on George Mathers Road. There are five of them in a row, shining like freshly polished boots.
Unusually, recommended aftercare for Tibetan cherries - other than the obvious watering, weeding and pruning - involves looking after the bark to maintain its gleaming showroom finish. As the Collins Field Guide to the Trees of Britain and Northern Europe puts it, rather brutally: “Where admired and stroked, (the bark is) bright, glossy mahogany with pale brown horizontal bands of lenticels” (pores); where out of reach or ignored, deep blackish purple, hard, curling scales, amid massed sprouts.”
Books and articles recommend buffing it gently to bring out the shine, rubbing off buds to avoid those massed sprouts and carefully peeling off any loose, translucent strips of bark to reveal the glow within.
The Pynnersmead maple
The Cappadocian maple (Acer cappadocicum) at Pynnersmead is the second to be planted in Herne Hill this year, two months after the one at 36A Carver Road. They’re a welcome addition to our growing collection of Acers here: nine big silver maples (Acer saccharinum) and a trident maple (Acer buergerianum) on Stradella Road, another two silver maples on Herne Hill, between Frankfurt Road and Danecroft Road, and Norway maples (Acer platanoides) inside the Delawyk estate and along Sunray Avenue, Red Post Hill, Danecroft Road and Herne Hill.
Almost all maple leaves have multiple lobes in various shapes and configurations, ranging from three lobes to nine, and colour beautifully in the autumn. Each broad Cappadocian leaf has seven finely tipped lobes and will turn a rich buttery yellow in October.
But the Pynnersmead tree’s most striking feature - at least for now - is the bark: yellow-green, highly patterned with wavy dark green stripes and tiny brown diamonds. You could easily mistake it for one of the many snakebark maples, which look sensational in winter, but sadly the Cappadocian’s decoration soon fades to grey-brown as the tree gets older.
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