14-Nov Cedars, Redwoods & Monkey Puzzles

It doesn’t flower for the first twenty-five years of its life and then takes another year to form its attractive blue-green cones and yet another before we see them dark brown and barrel-shaped sitting upright on the flat branches.

There was a fashion in the late eighteenth century led by Capability Brown and others to plant them either directly outside country houses or as a key part of their landscaping plans for the gardens.

Fine specimens can be seen beside Forty Hall in Enfield, Addington Palace in Croydon and by the lake at Claremont. These trees, with their scented timber, are mentioned in the bible more than any other plant. It is said they were taken from the slopes of Mount Lebanon to build King Solomon’s temple where the dome on the rock now stands in Jerusalem.

Two other cedars commonly seen in London especially in parks are the Atlas cedar C x. atlantica and the Deodar cedar C. deodara. Like all true cedars they can be recognised by their small rosettes of leaves.

The Atlas cedar has several forms but it is the blue one C. a. glauca which is the most popular. A much rarer golden form C. a aurea can be found in Osterley park. Specimens of C. atlantica itself can be very difficult to separate from Cedar of the Lebanon. The most reliable difference is a small translucent spine, only seen using a lens, at the end of C. atlantica’s leaves and not present on the leaves of Cedar of the Lebanon. A specimen on the lawn at Beales arboretum is believed to be partly both species.

Presumably which part is which can only be determined with a lens. A fine specimen of the Blue Atlas cedar, thirty-three metres high, can be seen in High Elms country park.

The third cedar of this small group of only four true cedars is the Deodar cedar C. deodara. It is quite different from the other two being normally pyramid in shape, with drooping ends to its branches and a drooping leader. Cedars are often just quickly separated by their branching alone, upward indicating Atlas, horizontal Cedar of the Lebanon and drooping Deodar.

The leaves of the Deodar are usually a brighter green than the others but do become more blue-green with age and even develop a glaucous bloom. This is the “sacred Indian fir” or “Tree of God” from the Himalayas which was used to build temples before the British arrived in India and started using it to make railway sleepers. All three cedars can be seen in Osterley Park or even just walking around the streets of Dulwich village. There is just one other much rarer true cedar, the Cyprus cedar C. brevifolia which is hardly ever planted, although one can be found in the Valley Gardens.

Redwoods need little introduction being among the tallest, largest and one of the oldest living creatures on the planet. These are the Coastal Redwood Sequoia sempervirens and the Giant Redwood Sequoiadendron giganteum. The Coastal Redwood has its leaves in opposite rows like a yew and the Giant Redwood has tiny green leaves so pressed against its twigs they look almost like green cords. These giants come from that Shangri-la for conifers, the north-western seaboard of America. Both have strange spongy boles that you can punch with impunity and each can soar to over one hundred metres and live for over two thousand years.

Sadly in Britain they only reach between a third or half of these heights and far, far less in London. The odd-looking coastal redwood beside the bowling green in Battersea park has grown just a metre or two in the last forty years.

To see more impressive specimens you have to go to Leith Hill in Surrey where it faces the Weald. Here there are places that have similarities to temperate rainforest and the small groves of coastal redwoods have that cathedral quality they are famous for. Nearby beside a wall on Abinger Common is a fine specimen of the Giant Redwood. It is set, as all great trees should be, by itself on open land with little to distract from its enormity. Here you can enjoy its rufous red bark and buttressed trunk ascending absolutely vertically to the sky. Its branches, with their upturned ends because of no amputations, come close to the ground where you can crush its coarse foliage and smell aniseed.

The Monkey Puzzle tree Araucaria araucana is the last of these eye-catching trees. It arrived in 1795 and was so adored by Victorian Londoners they planted it everywhere.

It is now almost as common in small front gardens as it is in public parks. It hales from a small section of the lower Andes in South America where it can soar up to forty-five metres. You tend to notice first it is completely covered in large, tough pointed leaves, These are what are supposed to make it such a puzzle for monkeys to climb. Its trunk is not unlike an elephant’s leg complete with toes and it has flowers the size of coconuts. You can find a twenty-two metre high specimen in Windsor Great Park and one of its rare relations A. angustifolia can be found in the Chelsea Physic garden.