TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF

There are 8.3 million trees in London, almost one for every member of the capital’s population, but they need our protection now more than ever, finds Jack Watkins

- Jack Watkins

Towering plane trees in Hyde Park.

JOHN EVELYN, whose Sylva (published in 1664) was the original sounding of the bugle to plant more trees, wasn’t a fan of the sycamore. He wanted the species, with its ‘contaminating’ leaf litter, ‘banished from all curious gardens and avenues’. So the Deptford guru would not have been impressed to hear that, in the 21st century, the sycamore is the most numerous tree type in London. Numerous, but still not loved. There’s not a single one in the list of 61 specimens awarded Great Tree status by the former Countryside Commission and the charity Trees for Cities, after nomination by the city’s inhabitants.

Indeed, the streets are top heavy with London planes—a hybrid of American sycamore and Oriental plane. In central London, they are as much a part of the cityscape as red buses and black taxis. They stand like sentinels along the main thoroughfares and in parks and squares. London planes are pollution resistant and able to withstand compacted and covered soil. In the winter, you can identify them by the spherical catkins that hang down on long stems. When the Victorians laid out the Embankment between Westminster and Blackfriars in the 1860s, they planted them at regular intervals all down the street, the first formal example of lining a London road with trees. The Embankment is too clogged with traffic and a sense of rush to be beautiful, but imagine it without those tall and stately planes.