Trees in urban gardens

As a general rule, trees are a good thing and it is easy to understand why there is plenty of support for planting as many as possible and preserving what we have.  On the other hand, there are plenty of circumstances when a particular tree or a group of trees is very far from a good thing.  Because trees come in such a wide range of species and sizes, it behoves tree owners to be careful in their choice of which trees to plant or to conserve.

Moreover, it is important to realise that not all trees that we have in Harringay were planted by some human agency.  Walking in ladder streets I often see ash or sycamore trees that plainly began as seedlings growing in cracks by walls.  In my view, any house owner would be wise to have those things out as soon as they appear.  If the roots won’t come out, then cut them flush with the ground and poison the stump with glyphosate.  It’s no good dreaming that they will grow into a beautiful asset.

In the 1990s I was living abroad and a gardening company looked after my garden while I was away.  After a tree blew down in a gale, the gardener suggested a replacement.  What about a tulip tree he asked.  In my ignorance (thinking that perhaps he meant a magnolia) I agreed.  When 15 years later, I finally returned, the tulip tree was already 30 feet tall and I finally did some research – in fact the research was made easier by the fact that my wife’s uncle in Pennsylvania had a tulip tree growing by his typical wooden house.  The trunk was at least three feet in diameter and it soared far above the surrounding tree canopy.  According to Wikipedia, this tree is a native of Appalachia where it can grow over 150 feet tall.  Obviously, this is completely inappropriate in an urban garden however large it might be.  My gardener clearly was as inexperienced as I was.  That tree had to go and I quickly got rid of it.

It is not just tulip trees that are wrong for urban gardens.  The aforementioned ash and sycamore can also grow so big that they can completely fill a typical ladder garden and overshadow neighbouring gardens.  The picture below shows a beautifully shaped sycamore which would be an asset on Hadrian’s Wall.  In fact it is in a tiny garden of about 60 square metres.  The tree canopy itself is larger than that so it dominates both its own location and two or three gardens to its north.  As it happens, this is not a problem for me but I should not wish to have a neighbour to my south who allowed such a tree to become established.