The weather on Wednesday morning was inclement, nevertheless sixteen Friends of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens gathered under the bandstand in Hyde Park. There was a high attrition level in my party.
Bali’s owner thought he would get too wet and cold and my man in the Foreign Office thought he had a cold and pulled out with his terrier, Stella. Our guide was an arborist, a hardy perennial who never opened his gamp and only once briefly pulled up his hood. This is the first tree that he showed us.
It is, he opined, the rarest tree in Hyde Park. It’s called Turner’s oak because Spencer Turner produced it artificially in his nursery in Essex in the 18th century. It is a hybrid; a cross between an English oak and a Mediterranean Holm Oak. Its full name is Quercus turneri Pseudoturneri and if you are thinking of something unusual for your arboretum it might be just the ticket. It was first planted at Kew in 1798 and that specimen is still just about surviving, albeit on an arboreal Zimmer frame after the 1987 Great Gale.
Then we looked at a selection of trees in flower, starting with this red hawthorn and then a Judas tree.
The flowers on this pocket handkerchief tree looked like damp Kleenex. Other names for it are dove tree and ghost tree and its official name is Davidia involucrata. Then we went to the dell where rare specimen trees have been planted since the 19th century. My Smythson Panama diary was showing signs of turning into papier-mâché so I didn’t take notes but there were unusual ash trees, maples and a newish Monkey Puzzle. Our guide appreciates the bark, flowers and leaves on the trees in his charge but didn’t have much time for this – “looks like a toilet brush”.
Since we had started with the rarest we finished with the biggest, in girth, and it’s some sort of walnut, I think.
This was our last stop, Rangers Lodge, where our Chairman awaited us with coffee, wine and nibbles. It was a pity about the weather but it brought out the best in our doughty members one of whom was en route to a birthday lunch party in a swanky restaurant atop the Hilton Hotel.