"O look at the trees!" they cried.

Press, 16 February 1980, Page 16

"O look at the trees!" they cried.

...Robert Bridges

t( London Snow 11

12. GROVE IN THE PARK

Pencil drawing by

OWEN R. LEE

Text bv DERRICK ROONEY

. Few, if any, more felicitous groupings are to be found in Christchurch than this grove of mature trees which is now the main car-park at the Botanic Gardens. They are common European species, mostly oaks, ashes, and sycamores, and a few silver birches. None is of outstanding horticultural merit; none is an outstanding specimen of its kind. None has showy flowers to match the koelreuterias and paulownias inside the Gardens, across the Avon. But together they are a subtle and harmonious group—tall shapely trunks dappled with the light filtering through their canopy and framed by the rich boskage of ornamental shrubs across the river. Cries of outrage greeted the decision, years ago, to site a car-park among these trees, and perhaps eventually the pounding of thousands of tyres will take toll of the root system. But so far there are no signs of damage, and it could even be said that the cars, and the ugly spread of gravel, have emphasised the quality of this planting, for as the eye goes upwards to avoid man’s intrusion it becomes

more deeply aware of the patterns of trunks and twigs. This pattern of course changes with the seasons, and at different times different trees are dominant. In summer it is the oaks, with their densely leafy canopy, and the sycamores, with their smooth ash-grey bark. In autumn, as the leaves complete their annual cycle and begin to die, these trees colour in a quiet, but altogether satisfying, way: soft yellows from the ashes, the birches, and willows on the riverbank, mixed with russet and brown from the daks and the sycamores. In winter the white trunks of the birches shine through the branches around them, and the huge, dried leaves of the sycamores crackle underfoot —• reminders that the sycamore, for all its familiarity, and despite its free-seeding habits, remains one of Europe’s great trees. All the more pity that the botanists should have relegated it to second-class status by calling it “Acer pseudoplatanus” —the “maple that looks like a plane tree”—for the sycamore, when mature and well grown, matches the plane tree both in stature and appearance, and it makes better timber.