Planes updated and a lime tree

On 3rd May I showed the lopped plane out the back. Here it is now, proving they do indeed recover, though the price was about two months with nothing to show -- as if spring had been abolished.

And elsewhere in Surbiton (see same post, last pic) the planes on the street are looking like this.

In a couple of other postings in May I told how I’d had my lime-tree-awareness raised, first in Berlin and then in Kingston. Well, here’s a fine one in Surbiton (which is in the Borough of Kingston):

See labels 'plane trees' and 'lime trees'.

I don't like the sound of this Sudden Oak Death disease they've got in Devon.

Lopped planes and the trees of Berlin

Pity I didn’t have my camera when out today. The planes that I presume were lopped first are sprouting. The one at the back of my flats, though, still has no life and has been colonised today by a bunch of rooks and some magpies. There goes the neighbourhood. Their noise suggests a dispute but I can’t see what about.

I've been in Berlin since my last post and there I saw more lime trees than ever before. The ones you see here are usually small and ornamental, and are found in towns on roadsides and in parks, like the ones along the Severn in Shrewsbury. According to Oliver Rackham, however, it was once one of the dominant trees of Britain, and the tallest.

I didn’t warm to the trees in Berlin. Here we’re good at trees in parks and parkland but in Germany you have the feeling that the forest is only provisionally and partially cleared and would be back if they all went on holiday for a couple of months at the same time. It’s as if they fell enough trees to stick a building up and never get round to removing the rest, so you see a toddlers’ playground in front of an apartment block overhung by giant trees that cause a permanent gloom for the kids to play in. And whereas English oaks tend to be light and luminous -- sometimes almost backlit -- the trees amongst the Berlin blocks are of some dark and dull species, somewhere between sycamore and the maples I knew in Ottawa, maybe a European maple. It’s the Wald, that’s what it is, the Teutonic forest that swallowed up Varo’s legions so they could be massacred by Arminius (Hermann the German); and it’s overlaid only superficially by Berlin.

Limes are lighter but even they don’t relieve the gloom. And in the parks the grass is uncut and scrappy, as in Mexican parks. Berlin strikes me like a colonists’ city: they’ve moved in recently and imposed their massive buildings and infrastructure on a landscape they’ve never paused to domesticate and convert from nature to culture.

Which I suppose is why Berlin is exciting in a way no English city could ever be. I loved it. But that’s another story, or posting.

The trees in Surbiton

[The date on this should actually be 13 May 2010, though I started it nearly a fortnight ago.]

Spring is well advanced. The horse chestnuts are in full leaf and near-full bloom. If they’ve still got the disease they all showed last year (see Label horse chestnuts) there’s no sign of it now.



The oaks are outish. As for the saying about ‘If the oak is out before the ash, summer will but be a splash, If the ash is out before the oak, it’ll be a soak’ (or something more metrical), I don’t think I've seen a single ash tree in Surbiton.

As for the planes, which here are only where they’ve been planted -- and perhaps everywhere? is there such a thing as a wild plane in Britain? -- the general state is ...

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[New text:] I wrote the above intending to go out and photograph planes when the weather brightened up. The place to see them is Maple Avenue, which despite its name is a fine avenue of planes. My intention was to insert photos of them, and then to contrast it with the following:

[Original text continues] The one I can see from the back of the flat, though, was lopped on 30th April. I wish I’d photographed it just before but you can see what it looks like now:


On 29th April the shoots that grew since last year’s lopping -- maybe 6 feet long and prolific -- were in visible buds that were beginning to open. I'm interested to see how long the tree takes this year to recover. It’s clear the operation does it no harm, and is entirely necessary for the amenity of the houses and probably for safety.

[New text resumed] Yesterday morning I finally made it down to Maple Avenue and this is what I found:


I'm sure there are other planes in Surbiton, perhaps unlopped, but I can’t think where. I suspect that all planes are under the management of the council who go round each year and do the lot.

Anyway, original text from now on:

Why am I suddenly doing this nature recording? I've been reading Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne from the later 18th century. White has earned the huge respect of modern naturalists for his innovatingly thorough and intelligent observation and recording -- a truly Enlightenment enterprise -- except in one respect: when he saw a rare or interesting bird and had his gear with him, he shot it. On those grounds he counts himself a ‘sportsman’. But in those days the bounty of Nature must have seemed inexhaustible.