Out of scale Posted on May 1, 2020

More at home in a park

I think I’ve worked out why this little London garden has a tree in it as tall as the garden is long. It lends a certain gravitas to a modest patch to boast a tree the size of a Hyde Park plane, even if a sycamore is a rather lower form of life. But it was here when we bought the house and we would certainly not be allowed to cut it down. Indeed it’s an annual struggle getting the council’s permission to prune it. Each year we ask RBKC – as we call our local authority – for permission to climb the tree and remove most of the last season’s growth. If we didn’t it would reach out over five or six gardens by now. We then have to cut it into small enough pieces to carry through the house.

Why not, we ask RBKC, an ongoing licence, since the same problem arises every year? But no, Proper Procedures etc….. which this year took so long that it was too late, the tree was in full leaf and we shall have to wait a year in its shade.

At least I’ve discovered its probable story. It’s a war baby. We just measured its girth at breast height: 7” 3’. Following the rule of thumb that most trees put on an inch of girth a year, that makes it 87 years old. Oddly, its ground level is four feet higher than the rest of our garden, and the neighbours’. Its end of the garden has now been paved, with steps up to it. I suspect it was a weed seedling on a compost heap, ignored during the war and now formally incorporated, and an object of rather wry pride.

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Trad? Who’s he?

Trad’s Diary started as the editorial column of the RHS Journal when it was remodelled and relaunched as The Garden in 1975. I was responsible for the changes, wrote the column then, and still do when I have an idea, 45 years later. I am Hugh Johnson, author of Trees, The Principles of Gardening, and lots of stuff about wine.

Trad borrows his name from John Tradescant, gardener to Lord Cecil at Hatfield and to King James I, one of the first to introduce plants from abroad to England. His family name, having become extinct, seemed a fitting label for a column of garden jottings. It was adopted in 1977 by the new Trust for the Garden Museum in Lambeth, where John Tradescant (the accent is on the second syllable) lived and is buried. Today the museum is in full and exciting expansion mode. I urge you to visit its website, visit it personally, and support it as much as you can.

Trad took to the ether as a blog in 2008. There have been two anthologies, in 1993 and 2009, and since 2008 the text has been published quarterly in Hortus magazine. Scroll back, if you have time to waste, over hundreds of earlier entries. Better, use the Search button to look up things that might interest you. This index facility is priceless to the diarist; now he can see how often he repeats himself. Thanks to Simon Appleby and Bookswarm for making this happen.

Hugh’s Gardening Books

Sitting in the Shade

This is the third anthology of Trad’s Diary, cherry-picking the past ten years. The previous two covered the years 1975…

Hugh’s Wine Books

World Atlas of Wine 8th edition

I started work on The World Atlas of Wine almost 50 years ago, in 1970. After four editions, at six-year…

Friends of Trad

The International Dendrology Society (IDS)