The blame falls mainly on the Abbey’s planes
Ican’t say I like plane trees more than others. The trunks are lumpy and they tend to lean. But I did find myself admiring a large specimen round which Westminster council had built a little wall, near Westminster Cathedral.
The plane trees around Westminster Abbey seem to have few friends. The excellent house magazine, the Westminster Abbey Review, carries an all-out attack on them by James Davy. “It is claimed that they are too big,” he writes, “block views, are difficult to manage and are a potential safety risk – though they are regularly inspected.”
Nothing these trees do is right, it seems. Their seeds block up gutters, their leaves are slow to compost, their branches suddenly fall off (squashing the car belonging to the choir school matron on one occasion), and one plane tree even had the effrontery to catch fire when rubbish that had blown into its hollowed side went up in flames.
Not being a native species, they were planted mostly in the 19th century, because they were resistant to London’s sooty air. Now the air is clean, “many think that they are a menace and that they should be replaced with other, more attractive and more suitable, trees”.
The fate of trees has been complicated by the Church of England embracing ecology as a godly virtue. This marches in time with secular environmentalism. Last year, the Bishop of London posed for the cameras with the deputy mayor of London, pretending to push along a barrow full of sapling (past the very same cursed planes of Westminster Abbey) in aid of the Conservation Foundation’s project “Trees for Sacred Spaces”, which was to help churches in the London, Southwark, Chelmsford and Rochester dioceses to plant more trees.
A survey in 2015 found that London’s 8,142,000 trees sequestered 67,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year and removed 2,200 tons of “pollution”. The total annual benefit was £132.7million.
Whatever the accuracy of these figures, they do reflect an expectation of trees performing a utilitarian good.
In former centuries, trees were valued for useful timber, firewood, fruit, withies and so on. But I also discern an attitude from the past that assumed a good old tree was valuable in itself. It didn’t have to be explained.
Perhaps that is why so many churchyards preserve ancient yew trees, which people like to think predate the Christian Church itself. One next to the church of St Andrew, Totteridge, is said to be the oldest living thing in London.
A slightly different attitude to trees takes them as historic emblems. There is a splendid spreading specimen of the common fig, Ficus carica, growing in front of the great hall at Lambeth Palace. Its variety was known to gardeners as the White Marseilles, cropping twice in hot summers. People say that this tree was planted by Reginald, Cardinal Pole in 1556, when he was Archbishop of Canterbury. I’m not sure where they get the information from, but if the tree does derive from one planted at Lambeth, I think the original grew in a different spot there.
No matter. The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, took a cutting when he went to see Pope Francis in 2014. He told the Pope that the same tree in Lambeth and in Rome would be “a visible sign” of both churches growing and bearing fruit from the same source. I hope the one in Rome is still doing well.
Dean’s Yard at Westminster has room for some big trees, so if they chop down the planes,
I’d like to see an oak, and then a mulberry, perhaps, and – what else?