Battersea’s Trees
By Clare Graham, Chair, Open Spaces Committee
News about Wandsworth’s just-completed 2023-4 planting programme, its new tree watering regime, a forthcoming survey of street trees—and the idea of setting up a new community tree nursery.
Trees in our local open spaces
Bluebells and green trees this week in Battersea Woods. All photos in this article are by the author.
After a cold wet start to the year, I am enjoying seeing the trees in our local open spaces coming into leaf at last on my daily walks with the dog. The shot above shows Battersea Woods—which, if you don’t already know them, can be found next to The Avenue, on Clapham Common. Down the road in Falcon Park the Coronation Year Tree that the Society planted last December is also off to an encouraging start (below). If you'd enjoy a tree-focussed stroll yourself, why not try out the interactive map of the trees of Battersea Park, created last year by Clive Freedman for the Park's Friends organisation? It can be used on a smartphone to help you find the most historic, notable or exotic of the park's 4,000 plus trees—or indeed to plan a route taking you past those currently in flower this month.
Foliage on the Battersea Society’s Coronation Year liquidambar ‘Worplesdon’ this week.
Tree Planting and Tree Maintenance
A new tree recently planted in Elsley Road.
Tree-lovers might also like to consider joining the Wandsworth Tree Wardens, a volunteer body which works with Wandsworth Council and its professional Tree Team to help promote and ensure the welfare of the borough's trees. I'm a Tree Warden myself and was at WTW's AGM last week where Liam Hutton, Wandsworth's Senior Arboricultural Officer, reported on its latest public tree planting programme. Each year, several hundred new trees will be planted between November and March, so the 2023-4 planting season has just concluded. It saw just over 800 new public trees planted across the borough. Around 180 of those were for parks and commons, another 120 were planted on council housing estates—and the remaining 510 were new street trees. The example above was recently planted in Elsley Road; as the label says it's a prunus Umineko, or upright flowering cherry. The top of the stake will be marked with orange paint shortly, to identify it as a 2023-4 tree.
Both WTW and the Tree Team are delighted that Wandsworth Council recently agreed to water new trees regularly for the first two years after planting, not just one as before. This has always been seen as good practice, even without the new rigours of climate change. Young trees often need more than a year to overcome the shock of transplanting, and establish successfully. Sadly this can be seen below, in the photo of a bed with three dead liquidambars, at the junction of Elspeth Road and Lavender Hill. Those were planted by Transport for London back in autumn 2021, as part of its improvements to the adjacent road crossing; public trees on Red Routes are the responsibility of TfL rather than Wandsworth Council. As I reported back then, initially it looked good, but it soon started suffering from a lack of maintenance. Most of the perennials have now died, and been replaced by weeds. The liquidambars survived 2022, I assume with some watering (TfL’s trucks water in the small hours, when the Red Routes are at their quietest) but failed in the summer of 2023. I agitated for their replacement last autumn; this didn't happen, but I was told earlier this month that TfL hopes to find funds to 'rejuvenate' the whole bed shortly. But it was still sad to see three fine young specimen trees lost for lack of maintenance.
The TfL bed on Elspeth Road with its three dead liquidambars this week.
Looking ahead
A very young English oak (Quercus robur), grown by the author from an acorn.
The next task for the Tree Wardens is to survey all street trees planted in 2022-3 (identifiable by their white-topped stakes) and 2021-2 (blue-topped stakes). This survey will be carried out in the next few weeks, using details provided by the Tree Team. It’s organised by ward, and I'll be covering Shaftesbury & Queenstown. We've done similar surveys in previous years and again, it’s good news this year that for the first time we’re being asked to cover two years, rather than just one. As the 2023-4 trees have only just gone in, those will be surveyed at a later date.
Finally, another really interesting idea floated at the WTW AGM was the possible creation of a community tree nursery for Wandsworth. Boosting community tree nurseries is one of the current priorities of the Tree Council, within an Establishing trees outside woodlands project. That’s all about finding sustainable new ways of increasing tree cover across the UK, to help combat climate change and enhance biodiversity. In a community tree nursery, volunteers plant tree seeds and cuttings collected locally, growing them on under controlled conditions to become viable new trees. Potentially it's a great way to produce high quality, bio-secure, diverse, locally sourced and grown stock for future planting—and also of course to engage local communities in the process. Finding a suitable space for such a nursery within the borough may prove tricky, but both the Tree Wardens and the Tree Team were enthused by the idea, and plan next to visit The Tree Musketeers' successful scheme over on Hackney Marshes to learn more.