Brian Sewell: My plea to save the London tree

We lose trees every day and in every season, but the pollarding and felling in the late spring when birds are on their nests is the cruellest time for casual butchery. We fell them for trivial offences — for overhanging bedroom windows and tapping on the glass, for leaching water from the lawn, for throwing shade over beds that should be bright with beastly dahlias. Trees make work, we argue, and cost good money to maintain. Trees outgrow their welcome and are better not planted in the first place.

The subversive among us, however, hold the entirely contrary view that trees are beautiful, mysterious, even weird, that they are primordial and remind us of our insignificance among the natural wonders of the world, that in spring and summer they offer a range of intensity of greens to outdo a billion lettuces and cabbages, that in their autumnal colours they vanquish every border of hardy perennials, and that in winter they draw themselves against the sky with skill that surpasses David Hockney's. We should listen to them too, for there are no sweeter sounds than the whispers of the pine and poplar, the sighs of the willow over water, the quivers of the aspen in still air. As the poet Edmund Blunden put it in the year of my birth, we subversives "are for the woods against the world".

The graves of my dogs are marked by oak and pine, a woman friend is remembered in a mulberry, and a particular melancholy day in Florence is recalled by an Italian cypress taken from the broken gravestone of a Sewell buried there. It is my hope that long after I and they have been forgotten, these, my chestnut and my beech, still will stand, still feed the local parakeets and squirrels, still do their bit for the environment.
Great trees have always made London beautiful; they lined the roads and turnpikes into the metropolis, providing shade for travellers and beasts of burden; they lined the banks of the Thames, they grew lofty in the gardens of great houses and in the garden squares, they shaped and enriched the distant prospects from Greenwich and Hampstead, and they framed the countless landscapes and townscapes of London and her environs recorded by a thousand painters of the urban view. These trees are as much of our heritage as any work of art in which they have appeared, yet they are under constant threat.

Developers fell them to crowd extra houses on a site, supermarkets to accommodate superstores, railways to keep leaves from the lines, and local councils for safety reasons that are often absurd. We should cherish them, and for every one felled, we should plant two.

I raise these points because Time Out is about to publish an illustrated paperback of The Great Trees of London — and there are only 56 of them. On a map reaching from Enfield to Carshalton and Hounslow to Dagenham there are only 56 trees exceptional for their height, girth, reach, age or rarity. In what most of us think of as central London there are only 10, among them a great plane in Berkeley Square, an elm on Marylebone High Street, an ash in the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church and an Indian Bean Tree (Catalpa) in the yard of St James's Piccadilly.

There should be more. What trees were there in Covent Garden, in the gardens of the great houses that once fronted the Thames, in Bloomsbury where there was a notable wood of oaks a thousand years ago and in St John's Wood less than a century ago?

That a century is quite enough to make a great tree of a sapling is proved by the plane in Ravenscourt Park, a monstrous stunted trunk six feet in diameter, a Wagnerian Nibelung of a tree on a bad hair day, dating back only to 1888. Plant a plane this autumn and your children too could be the owners of a tree worthy of the Brothers Grimm in November 2110. But even a decade is enough to make a difference — my oak, a sapling of my height nine years ago, is now 40ft tall and a candidate for greatness. I used to think that housing developments were bleak because forest trees were slow to grow, but now I know this not to be the case. I therefore plead with all local councillors and planning officers to plant trees that will grow big and tall and wide in their developments. I beg all who have influence on the Olympic sites of 2012 to ensure that we have great trees to gentle their extravagant architectural monuments to sport. I hope that this well-written and researched guidebook to the London tree will have widespread influence on all planners and the noble lords of architecture. It is the perfect vade mecum for all who care for trees, offering the nearest bus stop, the very exit from the station, the footpath, the gate, the corner and best view. It encourages us all to go about with pockets full of acorns, and to plant oaks in honour of our births as well as deaths.

The Great Trees of London by Jenny Landreth is published on June 3 by Time Out with Trees for Cities, £12.99.