Who do we have to thank for the splendid variety of trees that adorn our local streets and parks?
Not everyone looks at, or even notices, the trees they walk under everyday. Perhaps in April when they light up with blossom and scatter confetti on every car. Perhaps in September when they begin to cover the pavement with potentially treacherous leaves.We rarely thank them, though, for the grace of their branches against the sky and the welcome shade they offer on a hot sunny day. Our part of Kensington is blessed with more trees, and mote different kinds of trees, than most, from the stately planes that give Pembroke Square its special dignity, to flowering cherries that for a few weeks in spring completely change the mood of otherwise unexceptional streets. Planes and cherries are commonplace; the bread and butter of street planting. The council’s tree officers, though, are doing a more imaginative job.
We live in Scarsdale Villas, which already has the advantage of being a double-width street. It was part of the property that Lord Kensington (of Holland House) sold to developers in the early years of Queen Victoria. One of these speculators had property in South Wales – hence our cluster of Pembrokes (square, road, villas…). Viscount Scarsdale had a mansion approximately where High Street Kensington station now stands. (Sutton Scarsdale, his seat in Derbyshire, is now a baroque shell, its rooms in a museum in Philadelphia.)
This doesn’t answer, though, the question of why we are so well endowed with trees. One of our biggest and best is a common ash which stands in the middle of the private Edwardes Square, hence hidden from public view. I suspect it may date from the creation of the square just after the Battle of Waterloo. (They say many of its first residents were the families of captured French officers). Long may it be spared from the die-back which is killing ashes round the country.
Two other huge specimens in our streets are the so-called Tree of Heaven (heaven knows why), Ailanthus altissima, originally from China. Others call it the tree from hell; it can produce overwhelming numbers of suckers from its roots. One stands on the corner of Abingdon Road and Stratford Road, mercifully not – or not yet – sending up suckers. Another, a tall straight specimen, is on the corner of Edwardes Square nearest the Scarsdale Tavern. Their ash-like pinnate leaves have a distinct smell of onions.
Scarsdale Villas is almost a linear arboretum, or ‘dog’s dinner’ as one council officer describes it. I have still to identify some of its ingredients. A fine Zelkova serrata, from the Caucasus, is an unlikely tree to plant in a street, being characteristically as wide as it’s high. There are plenty of beauties, though. I am only disappointed by the council’s recent planting of amelanchiers, charming light-weights that will never make fine tall shade trees. The best advice for planting street trees is to stick to the tried and tested; the classics. There is a reason why the great Platanus x hispanica is called by this formal botanical name. It has no native country. It is a hybrid between the talismanic Chennar tree of the East and the rare (in Europe) American native plane. Did the marriage happen in Spain, as the name suggests? Nobody seems to know.
