We've had another very successful planting season in 2023/24, with 40 new street trees in Herne Hill since November, each one delivering beauty, wildlife and cooling shade. That brings the total planted in the four years since Herne Hill Tree Watch started working with the council to an amazing 224 - roughly 10 new trees on average for every street in the neighbourhood.
And it's not over yet: there could be up to 15 more on the way before the season closes. Thanks are due to all our volunteers and supporters for making this transformation happen.
Click on the link to see which trees have been planted where and what's still in the pipeline. You'll find:
seven new trees on Carver Road
six on Frankfurt Road
six on Holmdene Avenue
five on Elfindale Road
four on Burbage Road
four on Danecroft Road
three on Hollingbourne Road
two on Elmwood Road
two on Half Moon Lane and
one on Delawyk Crescent
Before we go into the details of this year’s batch, another important newcomer is arriving here in the next couple of days. You’ll recall we emailed you earlier in March about the competition to choose a tree with a strong presence for the traffic island at Herne Hill junction, an important location right outside the main gates to Brockwell Park.
The winner of the public vote, with 322 votes, was the Pride of India, sometimes known as the Golden Rain tree but called in botanical Latin Koelreuteria paniculata. It’s a very fine tree with whiskery, fern-like foliage, pretty yellow flowers in July-August and unique fruit: papery lantern-like capsules that start off yellow, red and green but darken to a bronze colour in autumn. You can go and watch it being planted on Monday 25th March.
There’s more information on the winner, the runner-up and the also-rans on the Herne Hill Forum website. Just to give you a flavour of what the Pride of India looks like as winter draws to a close, here’s a photo, taken this weekend, of one coming into leaf in Shadwell, East London.
Our Koelreuteria will be the first on the streets of Herne Hill, although there’s one in the front garden of 64 Fawnbrake Avenue, one in the grounds of Judith Kerr school that overhangs the driveway of no. 2 Village Way and a third just inside Sunray Gardens, by the Elmwood Road gate. Also nearby, but strictly speaking in Dulwich, is a Koelreuteria on the pavement outside 262 Turney Road.
Coming back to our residential streets, we focused our planting plan - supported by Cleaner Greener Safer funding from Southwark - on medium-sized, drought-resistant trees that will help bring down pavement temperatures as our summers get hotter and hotter. They'll also capture and store more carbon from the atmosphere than small ornamental species and will be more suited to the fast-changing growing conditions.
Accordingly, most of the trees planted this season are older, thicker, taller, heavier and tougher than the saplings we’ve been used to. But not all of them have labels from the nursery, so in a few cases we haven't been able to identify them with total confidence. The names will be confirmed shortly when we get more information from the planting contractors and the council tree officers.
This is what we've got so far:
Seven cherries. Three of them are the Sunset Boulevard cultivar (Prunus 'Sunset Boulevard') with large, white, single flowers in early spring. There’s also one sour cherry (Prunus cerasus), with edible but bitter fruit; one Japanese amanogawa cherry (Prunus serrulata 'Amanogawa'), with fragrant, late-opening blossom; one native bird cherry (Prunus padus), which unusually carries its flowers in long, drooping spikes; and one uncommon hybrid cherry (Prunus x schmittii), a fast-growing tree with glossy brown bark, good autumn colours and a narrow, upright form.
Six exotic trees with showy, long-lasting flowers. Four are pink crape myrtles (Lagerstroemia indica 'Rosea'), a tree with attractive peeling bark, and two are pink or lilac hibiscus (Hibiscus 'Resi')
Five limes. That’s four native small-leaved limes (Tilia cordata 'Greenspire') and one Caucasian lime (Tilia euchlora). Both have the classic red buds of lime trees, but the cordata also has red shoots while the euchlora’s are green.
Five maples. Three are Cappadocian maples (Acer cappadocicum), with leaves like six-pointed stars cut in half across the middle; one a trident maple (Acer buergerianum) with striking autumn colour; and the last a columnar Norway maple (Acer platanoides 'Columnare')
Four magnolias. Three of these are the white-flowering northern Japanese magnolia (Magnolia kobus), well represented on Casino Avenue, and the fourth an evergreen southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora), which has large glossy, leathery leaves and enormous creamy flowers.
Four ginkgos. Ginkgo biloba, tall, angular and unmistakable. You’ll find many of these tough trees on our streets, especially Burbage.
Two weeping beech. Fagus sylvatica pendula, a weeping version of the native common beech.
Two honey locust trees. Gleditisia triacanthos, a light and delicate-looking tree with leaves made up of small 'leaflets' arranged along the stem. The standard Gleditisia is covered in thorns but this one is ‘inermis’, meaning ‘unarmed’.
One Swedish whitebeam. Sorbus intermedia 'Brouwers' is a pyramid-shaped fruiting tree with leaves like a native whitebeam but scalloped at the edges
One common holly (Ilex aquifolium), the native evergreen of the woods.
One white-barked Himalayan birch (Betula utilis jacquemontii 'Snow Queen')
One London plane (Platanus x hispanica)
And finally one tree (on Delawyk Crescent) that we can't yet pin down at all.
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