We’ve had a superb autumn show on the streets of Herne Hill, and while the heavy rain and strong winds of late October have stripped away many of the brightest leaves there’s still a lot to see. We’ll signpost some of the highlights below, so why not cheer up a damp and blustery walk around SE24 with some vibrant colour before we head into winter?
Autumn colour
Yellow is the theme this month and the most brilliant yellow comes from the ginkgos (Ginkgo biloba). You can get a close-up view of the extraordinary fan-shaped leaves, now a golden buttery colour, on the two young specimens at the top of Frankfurt Road, near the junction with Herne Hill.
For a real giant you’ll have to walk a little further afield to Court Lane to admire the glorious old ginkgo outside no. 23, much broader than its slender young relatives and at its autumn peak right now. There are also two very tall ginkgos on Burbage Road, outside nos. 47 and 73, which look amazing silhouetted against the red liquidambars (Liquidambar styraciflua), some of which are now past their best.
The big tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) around the neighbourhood are also making a sunny yellow splash, particularly the one at 96 Holmdene Avenue. Its unmistakable leaves look stunning in their autumnwear.
The recent stormy weather means our limes have now lost a lot of their foliage, but just a week ago the 30 tightly packed large-leaved limes (Tilia platyphyllos) running along Burbage Road from the pedestrian crossing to the doctor’s surgery were looking brilliant, wrapped in a lemon-coloured cloak.
But there are other colours than yellow still on show. The many different varieties of liquidambar available from tree nurseries mean they can be planted to create an ever-changing autumn spectacle, with colours ranging from a deep claret to purple, crimson and orange and brown appearing at different times.
If you walk down Burbage Road to the crossroads with Turney Road and look south you’ll be treated to the sight of a wonderful, multi-coloured column of liquidambars marching off towards Dulwich Park.
Another liquidambar, at the bottom of Beckwith Road where it meets Half Moon Lane, looks luminous and almost rainbow-striped in the morning sun, yet there are a couple further along the main road, towards the Half Moon pub, that haven’t even begun to turn from their summer green yet.
One more tree that’s putting on a fiery red display is the uncommon trident maple (Acer buergerianum) outside 48 Stradella Road, which also has a unique leaf shape.
Round the corner on Winterbrook Road the famous Yoshino cherries (Prunus yedoensis) are taking a well-earned break after six or seven months of showing off, but their fallen leaves on the pavements and in the gutters still look amazing.
Planting for autumn
If you’ve got room in your garden and you want to plant a small tree for autumn colour in the coming months, the Woodland Trust has a new guide that’s worth looking at. You’d be making a valuable contribution to our tree canopy at the same time. According to a recent survey reported by the BBC, urban areas in the south of England now have more tree cover than many rural districts further north.
A new elm wood?
Paul and Jeff had a very rewarding (and very wet) walk around Herne Hill late last month with Southwark’s top tree experts, Tree Services Manager Julian Fowgies and Urban Forester Oliver Stutter. We were mapping out places where trees have never been planted before and discussing the species that would work well in those spots. Like us, they’re firmly committed to increasing the borough’s tree cover.
Paul, who chairs the Friends of Sunray Gardens, is keen to plant new varieties of disease-resistant hybrid elms (Ulmus) in the park and bring the ‘Elm’ back into Elmwood Road. There’s been a patch of young native elms near the lake for many years, trees that dominated the English countryside until the 1970s. They regenerate naturally but eventually fall victim to Dutch elm disease when they grow taller.
Oliver suggested there could be one or two new elms outside Sunray Gardens too, on the grass verge along Red Post Hill - maybe Ulmus ‘Rebona’, which the council has already planted on Camberwell Green. There’s also an avenue of Ulmus ‘New Horizon’ in Peckham Rye Park, and nearer home another resistant elm, Ulmus americana 'Princeton', on the lawn outside Pynnersmead, near the bottom of Herne Hill.
The Princeton elm is bare now but you can see from the photo of the fallen leaf the asymmetrical base, where the left side is swollen compared to the right. That’s typical of elms. You can read more about resistant elm varieties at https://www.futuretrees.org/where-we-are-with-elm-review-released/.
Elmwood Road itself was named after a 400-year-old elm that grew in front of Elm Lodge, Half Moon Lane. where the Dulwich Mead flats now stand. The Herne Hill Society’s Heritage Trail records: “With a hollow trunk measuring 20-36 feet' in diameter, it was said to afford sitting room for 12 people… “
“By the early 20th century it was held together by strong chains and the top of the trunk was trimmed in 1928 in hopes of preserving it ‘for another half century or so’. However, the legendary tree was pulled down in the early 1980s to make way for Dulwich Mead.” Elm Lodge is still remembered in the name of the GP surgery on Burbage Road.
Carbon capture
Elms are tall broadleafs with a big canopy, the kind of tree that captures the most carbon from the atmosphere, so they’re good for future planting. But Southwark’s premier tree for mitigating climate change is undoubtedly the London plane (Platanus x acerifolia).
Although planes make up only 7% of the borough’s tree population, a report from the Treeconomics consultancy shows they provide 24% of the leaf cover. They top the rankings for sequestering atmospheric carbon, storing carbon in their stem and roots, removing air pollution and preventing run-off from heavy rain. And together the council’s London planes store about 10,000 tonnes of carbon.
Other climate-friendly species that are widespread here are English oak (in the woods and parks), sycamore, common ash, Norway maple, common lime, field maple, horse chestnut, wild cherry, silver birch and Chanticleer pear.
Late autumn fruit
The hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) is the sixth most numerous species in Southwark, but its environmental benefit is limited because of the small size of its leaves and the small leaf area of each tree. Nevertheless the hawthorns of Herne Hill produce lots of fruit for the birds to eat. According to BBC Gardeners’ World, the hawthorn is the second-best tree for feeding birds, just after the holly (Ilex) and ahead of the rowan (Sorbus aucuparia).
There’s a particularly colourful crop of big bright berries on the unusual hybrid cockspur thorn (Crataegus x lavallei) outside 19 Hollingbourne Road. While other hawthorns have lost most of their foliage, the dark green, glossy leaves of this hybrid make the fruit really stand out.
Signs of spring
The leaves may be dropping fast, but our trees are looking ahead and getting ready for spring. The grey alder (Alnus incana) at 48 Stradella Road is still carrying its black, dried-out cones from the summer, but alongside them are delicate pink and yellow catkins. The cones and catkins are both in fact flowers: the cones, originally green, are female and the catkins male. In the coming spring the catkins will pollinate newly emerging female flowers.
The Woodland Trust has a useful page about our native alder, which you’ll usually find by water. There are a number of them in Sunray Gardens.
Even where trees are bare you can still recognise different species in winter by their buds, which can now be seen much more easily. The horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), for example, has unmistakeable big dark brown buds that are sticky to the touch; ash buds (Fraxinus) are matt black, arranged in opposite pairs along the twig and in a clump at the tip; and lime (Tilia) buds are small, neat and often red or reddish-brown.
The Woodland Trust has a very simple winter recognition chart.
Another seasonal marker to look out for is a crop of spray-painted squares on the pavement reading ‘TREE’. Those are where the council is planning to plant trees over the coming winter. If you spot one one of these signs, or better still see a new tree going in, do drop us an email, noting the number of the nearest house.
Planting is unlikely to start until December, and we’ll bring you the street-by-street schedule from Southwark as soon as it’s officially confirmed.
Street works
There’s not a lot of maintenance work needed on our street trees at this time of year, but we did go out and prune London planes on Elmwood Road and Ardbeg Road in October and we have a work party planned for mid-December on Stradella Road.
Finally, we’d like to welcome David Langley as our street leader for Winterbrook Road.
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