Pohutukawa in the Scilly Isles

Forest and Bird, Issue 104, 1 May 1952, Page 9

Pohutukawa in the Scilly Isles

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TN the summer of 1951 I went to the Scilly Isles which are said to be subtropical, although geographically part of England. These islands are a four-hour voyage from the tip of Cornwall, and are traditionally known as “The Isles of the Blessed”, because of their sunny climate. Bathed by the warm Gulf Stream, they enjoy a climate somewhat like Gisborne, or the coast of Hawke’s Bay. In the terrible winter of 1947 they had only seven degrees of frost, and this was the first frost they had had for fourteen years.

In 1834 there were no trees on these islands, excepting a few stunted hollies about four feet high, and some broom. Indeed, it was doubted if trees would grow, for the islands are very low-lying, and the winds that swept across from the Atlantic often reached gale force. But Augustus Smith, who became Lord Proprietor in that year, believed that things could be changed, for he had come across medieval

manuscripts which mentioned that farmers digging in the islands had found “logs and stumps of oak and of elm, thirty inches in circumference”. He thereupon chose a hollow in the island of Tresco, and made a windbreak around it in a horseshoe-shape by planting New Zealand flax backed up by closely-planted macrocarpas. In this hollow, around the ruins of an old Benedictine abbey, he planted subtropical palms and trees, many of them from New Zealand. The result is astonishing. Here today grow rata and pohutukawa, giant nikau palms and Phoenix palms, fern-trees, tobacco, huge cacti like those of Mexico, and hundreds of other plants and trees which will not grow in the rest of England. These gardens are of wonderful beauty, and instead of having sculpture of marble or of bronze, they are decorated by figureheads of the numerous sailing vessels which were wrecked nearby during the nineteenth century.

The annual rainfall is only 31.87 inches and droughts as long as four months have been experienced. The daily mean sunshine is 4.68 hours and the mean temperature is 52.2 degrees Fahrenheit. In the fine Pohutukawa which grows in these gardens at Tresco, the aerial roots are particularly abundant, and many reach almost to the ground. One has, in fact, touched the ground, taken root, and is now a second trunk, eight inches to a foot in diameter, so that it not only gives extra nourishment to the tree during droughts, but also gives extra support during gales.

R. B. GODWARD