After Storm Katie, here come the spring greens in London's parks

As the winds blew across London, the city’s parks took a battering. Kew’s ‘Tree Man’ Tony Kirkham tells David Sexton why we should all go and hug a sapling
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Andrew McRobb
30 March 2016

The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said...” So Philip Larkin began his lovely short poem The Trees, which he started writing at about this time of year, on April 9, 1967. The poem ends with a hopeful guess at what that might be: “Last year is dead, they seem to say,/ Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”

So just before Easter I went to see the Tree Man at Kew, Tony Kirkham, head of the arboretum at the Royal Botanic Gardens since 2001. Lancashire-born, a proper countryman in town, Kirkham bounds into the Orangerie restaurant and begins talking nineteen to the dozen. It is exhilarating to meet someone not just with unrivalled expertise but such unbridled, almost boyish enthusiasm about what he does.

He’ll certainly have been well prepared for Storm Katie. For whenever reporters ask how Kew prepares for storms on the way in the next few hours, he says he responds that they’ve been preparing for 25 or 50 years.

Much was learned from the great storm of 1987 — “we lost 15 million trees in the south of England in probably about an hour. That was a real wake-up call — when I look back now it was probably one of the best things that happened, stimulating so much emotion and respect for trees. Lots of tree-planting programmes started — and in our profession we learned so much in that one night and changed our planting and management techniques.”

Having started at Kew as a student in 1978, he has worked with trees all his life. His days start at 7am with an hour’s walk around the garden, where there are more than 14,000 trees, and around 5,000 different species, some 250 years old. He oversees everything woody that grows outside there but his interest extends beyond Kew, from collecting trees from around the world to London’s remarkable treescape.

Tony Kirkham 
Matt Writtle

He’s big on caring for trees as well as planting more of them. “We need to look after our existing treestock,” he says. “We often talk about planting more trees which is great but often the existing stock gets neglected. There needs to be more effort from everyone, not just councillors and politicians, to take responsibility for trees in their neighbourhood. I have a tree outside my house — it’s lucky because I’m a tree man. We’ve got two new trees and I’ve watered them and watched over them. I think everybody should do that.”

There’s better awareness of trees these days. “But there’s never enough. One of our roles here at Kew is to promote this and raise awareness, and what we encourage people to do is get right up to trees … hug a tree, touch it, climb it … we don’t encourage climbing our trees but I got into trees when I was at school by climbing them, getting close to them. They’re fantastic things, they’re incredible things.”

At Kew, a log trail has been created for children — “the idea is that you get from A to B without touching the ground and children think they’re climbing trees, even if they’re only a metre up — it gets children away from televisions and computers”. In 2008 the extraordinary tree walkway was built — “it’s quite an exciting place to be — it moves. Trees are about movement and sway — we get paranoid when it’s windy but trees need to move and that’s how they generate their strength.”

Most people believe trees have root systems that go a long way down. “When I was at school I was taught that a tree is like an iceberg,” Kirkham himself says. The Great Storm reversed that assumption. “On the contrary, a tree is like a wine glass. You’ve got the goblet that’s the crown, and the stem that’s the trunk, and that flat bit on the ground holds your glass up — most trees at Kew are about 800mm deep, a metre maximum.”

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A little wistfully, he says he’d like to get rid of all the grass at Kew and just have woodland — “but obviously it wouldn’t look aesthetically pleasing”, he concedes. Instead they try to get rid of competition and compaction around the base of the trees, “get lots of oxygen in there, encourage mycorrhizal mulch — and basically we’ve fooled the tree into thinking it’s at home”.

“Ask people where trees come from and they say, oh, a garden centre or a nursery but go back a step further and they come from woodlands — and we stick them in the middle of a lawn, or a street, or a car park and expect them to do well. They’re out of their comfort zone from day one and they’re stressed — just like we would be.”

Nonetheless, London is “one of the greenest cities in the world and we’re really lucky to have that”. There are more than eight million trees in the city, one for every person, he reckons.

He has a particular passion for what he calls “shared trees, trees like the London plane, in streetscapes such as Embankment, the Houses of Parliament or Berkeley Square — imagine taking those trees out and putting lollipop trees in — it wouldn’t work. I encourage as much as possible planting not big trees but ones that are going to be big ultimately when they mature.

“Last summer we had the hottest day recorded in London. If that becomes the norm we will need shade trees — they’re the best air-conditioners, to cool everything, to soak up pollution and noise.”

Asked which tree symbolises London he opts straightaway for the London Plane, lamenting that it is now under threat from diseases. “Canker stain, plane wilt is not here yet and we don’t want it — prevention is better than cure and we need to keep it out through stricter biosecurity. There is free movement of trees in Europe and one thing I’ve been promoting is that trees brought into this country should go into a nursery situation for a year before they go into the landscape — a type of quarantine.” At Kew they’re doing what they call horizon-scanning, to see what diseases could be prevented.

As for the Garden Bridge, he’s advised its garden designer, Dan Pearson, recommending multi-stemmed trees. “A lot of people are talking about soil depth but I don’t think that’s an issue — I think it’s the wind over the Thames. It’s about getting the centre of balance right.”

Worries about the Garden Bridge have arisen just because it’s different, he suggests. “We probably all hated the fact of the Big Wheel going in — but now it’s a landmark, isn’t it? And there to stay. Buildings and landscapes change, and so does the treescape.”

He’s wary of mayoral promises to plant a particular number of trees. “It’s no good planting trees if you can’t maintain them. It shouldn’t be planting trees, it should be establishing them.” He can’t quote precise stats but reckons that “maybe for every five trees planted, one survives — it’s because the tree officers don’t have adequate budgets, to water, to do all the aftercare, and do all the work necessary to establish the tree”.

The Queen is the best tree planter, he laughs. “She never fails — if the Queen plants a tree for you, you’re going to go and water it!” The last tree she planted at Kew was a gingko, grown from historic seed he collected himself.

Put on the spot as to what tree might be planted for her 90th birthday, he plumps for the tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera, from the US east coast, Kew’s prize specimen having been planted about 1770.

“They are beautiful. They’ve got good autumn colour, lovely flowers, good form, good bark, no diseases.”

Meanwhile, if all Standard readers just give their nearest and favourite trees a bit of a pet, even a hug, “that’d be great!” So says the Tree Man.

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