COUNTRY MATTERS Roots: how trees link us to our past

*** STREET FLORA Naturalist Bob Gilbert tells Joe Shute why he returned the poplar to Poplar and how it stands as a symbol of hope for the future

In a corner of All Saints’ churchyard in the heart of London’s East End stands a single black poplar sapling. A poplar in Poplar may, on first impressions, not sound all that remarkable. After all, native black poplars were once so plentiful here lining the banks of the Thames and surrounding marshland that the London district was named after the tree.

Yet this particular poplar is now the very last of its species in the whole of the district of some 30,000 souls. Great responsibility rests on these slender stems.

The black poplar was planted by the author and naturalist Bob Gilbert, who noticed its absence after moving to Poplar in 2009 with his wife Jane and three children to enable her to take up a post as an Anglican priest at All Saints’ Church.

Uprooted on to unfamiliar ground, the 69 year-old, whose previous book The Green London Way was published in 2012, decided to explore his new sur- roundings by conducting an unofficial wildlife survey of Poplar. He printed and enlarged eight pages of the London A-Z and over the next few years embarked on an ecological version of the famous black-cab driver exam The Knowledge, walking through every street, park and sprawling housing estate and noting down his observations.

In particular, Gilbert paid attention to the trees; both those still standing and those he discovered long lost. The memory of these ancient sentinels are what William Wordsworth called “the ghostly language of the ancient earth”. It is through our street trees, Gilbert argues in his new book Ghost Trees, that city dwellers reconnect with the natural world being subsumed in glass and steel all around them.

“People have very strong affections for street trees and that is most apparent when something is under threat,” he says. “I love woods but the thing about urban street trees is people have a sense of propriety.”

Ghost Trees maps in fascinating detail how the trees planted in Poplar have defined each of its contrasting epochs: from the mulberry and apple orchards of the 18th century to the grand avenues of London planes and limes of the Victorian era. Gilbert says the first London planes were planted in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square but over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries slowly migrated into poorer districts in an attempt by planners to improve conditions for workers.

As we stroll past Poplar’s brutalist Balfron Tower, a Sixties housing estate constructed by the architect Ernö Goldfinger, he points out an avenue of limes. According to folklore, the lime was regarded as a tree of love. Here they serve a more prosaic function: blocking out the roar of traffic heading into the Blackwall Tunnel.

Unlike the ambitious urban planting projects of the past, Gilbert, who retired six years ago as a director in Islington Council’s environment department, says nowadays local authorities prioritise smaller species such as hornbeam and rowan to avoid compensation complaints and expensive pruning – as is the case in Sheffield, where the council has faced a storm of protest for felling thousands of street trees. In total, through his observations (which he stresses are very much at the unscientific end), Gilbert recorded 94 species and cultivars of trees across Poplar. Aside from the traditional species one might expect he also counted blue gums and cabbage palms from Australasia, Swedish whitebeam, Italian alder, Turkish oaks and laburnum. Black poplars, meanwhile, have been gradually supplanted by a hybrid Italian species as well as the Lombardy poplar.

In a city the scale of London, Gilbert says the concept of “native and nonnative species” is hardly applicable. One of his favourite trees in the area, for example, which he points out to me as we stroll to the churchyard, is a sugar maple, transformed a brilliant red in its autumn splendour.

He also discovered accidental imports of wild flower species, some of whose seeds had possibly jumped ship from the docklands. Among them were Chinese mugwort (a plant used in traditional medicine) and brown mustard seed which is commonly cultivated for cooking by Poplar’s large Bengali community.

“The city has been made on the basis of global trade and people arriving from all over the world,” he says. “And its flora and fauna has been created in the same way. You can trace different waves of immigration in Poplar through constituents of street flora.”

As Gilbert mentions in his introduction to the book, Britain boasts a “long and honourable tradition of Anglican clerical naturalists”, from the 16th and 17th century botanists William Turner and John Ray (labelled the father of English natural history) to most famous of all, the Rev Gilbert White of

‘If you’re concerned with the disconnect between people and nature then you have to be where the people are’

Selborne. While Gilbert is a Quaker, he is pleased that his experience becoming a “vicar’s wife” enables him to cling on to the coat tails of that tradition.

Of course, mapping the trees of an inner-city London district provides rather different challenges to more rural parishes. While generally Gilbert was left to his own devices as he walked the streets jotting notes, he was accosted by private security guards at Canary Wharf. “They were unfailingly polite but very quick to try and work out what I was doing,” he says.

Gilbert was born in Bermondsey and has always called London home. As a long-standing urban naturalist who has written a weekly nature column in the Ham& High newspaper for the past 25 years, he admits to a complex relationship with the capital city.

“Part of me yearns to live in the countryside with the sound of waves and wind through woods but I’m always drawn back to London,” he says. “If you’re concerned with the disconnect between people and nature then you have to be where the people are.”

All the same, he admits in the modern era the pace of change is frightening. All Saints’ churchyard sits in the shadow of the glass and steel monoliths of Canary Wharf, while all around new towers housing luxury flats for city workers are springing up. The irony with many of these new developments, Gilbert mentions, is they are often named after the very things they are eradicating. He points to Aspen Way, for example, a massive highway separating Poplar from Canary Wharf, with not an aspen in sight.

“Our future depends on halting the catastrophic decline in biodiversity,” he says. “Instead of blocks of glass and steel frontages totally unsuitable for wildlife we need to be building green roofs and walls and improving urban drainage. We need to design a city where we can live alongside other species.”

Our street trees, Gilbert says, provide this vital link to a better understanding of the natural world. When he arranged the planting of the black poplar a few years ago he decided to revive the ancient Poplar tradition of “beating the bounds” by gathering a group from the church congregation to walk the limits of the parish. They finished in the churchyard, where one by one they heaped earth on to the new tree.

What, I ask, does he hope for the future of the last black poplar? “I want it to be a symbol,” he says. “Of a city living more harmoniously with its wildlife.”

‘I love woods but the thing about urban street trees is people have a sense of propriety’

Sunday 28 October 2018

How to play Basics: Griddlers are solved using number clues to locate solids (filled-in squares) and dots (empty squares) to reveal a picture.

Each column and row has a series of numbers next to it. These refer to the number of adjacent squares that should be filled as solids. If more than one number appears, that line will contain more than one block of solids.

The solid blocks must appear in the order that the numbers are printed. For example, a row that contains the numbers 11.5 would contain, somewhere, a block of 11 adjacent filled-in squares (solids), then a gap of one or more empty squares (with dots in) and then a block of five adjacent filled-in squares.

Prince Harry “wasted no time” in trying on a sartorial gift during his Australian tour. What were the desirable items? (a) Board shorts (b) Budgie smugglers (c) Emu boots

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