Arboretum team blog

There are already many colourful and wonderfully scented flowering shrubs and bulbs in this early part of spring.

Apart from brightening up our days, most of the early bulbs are a great source of nectar and pollen for bees and other insects - even the occasional, very early overwintering butterfly which bright sunny days can sometimes trick into thinking it's warmer than it really is. A red admiral butterfly was spotted in the Arboretum this year on the 27 January!  Queen bumble bees rely on  the early flowering shrubs and bulbs to feed themselves and the first of their broods.

Here are some of the highlights:

Some of the earliest flowering are the aconites, snowdrops, and some species of crocus. Here C. tommasinianus are soon to be followed by lots of daffodils and bluebells in May.

The vibrant colours of just two of the many witch hazel cultivars.

The elegant and impressive long tassles of the male form of Garrya elpitica 'James Roof' '.

Fragrant shrub, Sweet box and Viburnum x bodnantense, brighten the coldest early spring days.

These are some of the many Hellebore seedlings raised from seed at Kew. The variety in their size and colour is amazing.
 

Apart from flowers, you can't beat a crisp spring morning sunrise.

- Tony -
 

Find out more

• Keep up to date with what's looking good in the Gardens with our bulbs map and find out more about the plants that are bringing spring colour to the Gardens

Looking after the Holly Walk

The Holly Walk at Kew has the largest number of mature holly cultivars in the world but in recent years some of the older specimens have started to go into decline. The main walk was given a bit of a makeover a few years ago, pruning some of the plants in an attempt to increase their vigour, decompacting the ground around them and giving them all a feed and mulch. This has already made a big difference but there were still gaps where we had lost a few trees over the years.

Visiting a holly nursery

Tony Kirkham (Head of the Arboretum), Susyn Andrews (a consultant horticulturist and taxonomist) and myself, Tony Hall, took a trip out to Highfield Hollies, a holly nursery in Hampshire, to choose some new plants for Kew's Holly Walk. We had a walk around the nursery, which has a very novel plant labelling system using recycled plastic bottles.

Several cultivars of interesting hollies were selected. We chose about a dozen new and interesting plants and labeled them up for collection, to be transplanted to Holly Walk at Kew a few days later

Trees on the move

The following week the Arboretum team headed off down to Highfield Hollies to collect the plants, which the team lifted from the nursery field.

Getting them back to the van was a tricky operation, having to negotiate a steep slippery slope! 

 The trees lined out next to their new home, ready for planting. 

With the planting mostly done, we still have a few more trees to select at a later date to complete the Holly Walk revamp. But meanwhile these young new plants take us a step closer to completing our planned improvements.

Newly planted trees. Just in time!

- Tony -

This has been a great year for berries. Wandering down Kew's historic Holly Walk at this festive time of year, you can see some of the amazing variety of colours in both berries and leaves, as well as some of Kew's attractive ivies.
 

British natives: the common holly, Ilex aquifolium, and the ivy, Hedera helix. 

Folklore

There is so much mythology and folklore associated with holly, from Christian links with Jesus and the crown of thorns in which the berries represent drops of blood, to stories of the Holly King in Celtic mythology. One of my favorites is that hollies were left uncut in old hedgerows, not only because it is supposed to be bad luck to cut down a holly tree, but also beacuse it stops witches running along the tops of hedges, as they were of course well known to do!

The holly hedge and dumplings behind the Palm House

There are many hollies around the garden, including the holly hedge and dumplings, planted in 1906, and those around the rose garden behind the Palm House. There is also an ivy hedge surrounding the Palm House. 

The hollies...

But it is along Holly Walk that we find most of the mature hollies laid out in 1874. Many of these trees are over 130 years old and are part of the largest collection of mature hollies in Europe. The majority of the hollies along Holly Walk are cultivars of the common holly, Ilex aquifolium and Ilex x altacerensis. Like the ones in the pictures below, they show a great variety of berry colour and leaf shape, and not all are spikey.
  

 
Image left: Ilex ' Frucu Luteo' Image right: Ilex x altacerensis 'Gold King'

... and the ivies

There are also some great looking ivies and again most of the more showy ones are cultivars:

  
Left: Hedera  colchica 'Dentata Variegata'; Right: Hedera helix 'Pennsylvanica'

But we can't forget...

Even though the title of this blog is titled 'The holly and the ivy', when it comes to festive plants you must not forget mistletoe. Not a common plant at Kew, but another one most people associate with Christmas.  
 

 
Mistletoe, Viscum alba 

Look out for my next blog in the new year, when the Arboretum team will be replanting many new hollies along Holly Walk, filling in gaps where we have lost trees the past, and adding more and different cultivars to keep this historic avenue growing for future generations.

- Tony -

Find out more

• Common holly (Ilex aquifolium)
• Mistletoe (Viscum album)
• Watch the slideshow about the history of Christmas plants
• Browse the image gallery of Christmas plants

I recently had a wonderful visit to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston USA. 

The grounds, consisting of 265 acres (107 hectares), are open free of charge to the public from sunrise to sunset 365 days of the year.

View of Boston from the top of St Peters hill, the highest point in the arboretum

The main purpose of the trip was to look at their plant database with colleagues from IT and our Gardens Development Unit.  An Arboretum tour was included as well as a trip to Mount Auburn Cemetery on a day off, which also has some magnificent trees.

The Visitor Center in the Hunnewell Building also includes the library and offices and is close to the new Weld Hill research building.

Kew's links with Arnold Arboretum

The plant collections contain around 15,000 specimens and include many historic introductions, mainly from eastern Asia and by collectors such as Ernest Wilson Charles Sargent, Joseph Rock, and William Purdom. It is the great plant hunter Ernest Wilson who links Kew with the Arnold Arboretum. We both have plants from his original collecting trips to Hubei and Sichuan in China. Plants that are now common in gardens were new, rare and much sought after in the early 1900s.

Wilson trained at Kew in 1898 and was picked by Thistelton-Dyer, the then director, to go on a joint collecting trip for Kew and Vietch nurseries to Hubei in China between 1989-1902., and again from 1903-1905. He then left Kew to work for the Arnold Arboretum from 1906-1909 and collected for them in Sichuan province during 1910.

Some highlights

This is the original Heptacodium miconioides, with its wonderful peeling bark, showing the pink calyx long after the flowers have finished.

Heptacaodium miconioides bracts

Another highlight was this Franklinia alatamaha, an American native, perhaps last seen in the wild in 1803 by the American collector, Lyon.

Franklinia alatamaha in flower

During a wonderful tour around the arboretum with Michael Dosmann, the curator, we saw many great plants and trees and were introduced to many of his colleagues working in IT, the arboretum, and the nursery.

Autumn colour

The fall colour in this part of the east coast is legendary. But as here in the UK, this year has been a bit on and off and the autumnal reds were only just starting to show during our visit.

Acer x freemanii in its stunning fall colours

Days out

On the Sunday we enjoyed two extra excursions. First stop was at the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see the Ware collection of glass models of plants! These were so realistic as to be almost unbelievable.

 After that it was on to Mount Auburn cemetery, America’s first landscaped cemetery consecrated  in 1831. This cemetery has some amazing trees among it's 5,000 mostly labelled specimens. Twenty-eight are state champions and 11 are New England champions.

Old family tombs in Mount Auburn Cemetery  

 We also saw lots of wildlife, including black squirrels - and even wolves! There were lots of amazing fungi too, including this strange looking Hercium sp.

Weird looking Hercium fungi with spines underneath

- Tony -

Luscious leaves

Trees display an array of vibrant colours at this time of year. Here's my pick of some of the best to look out for:
 

Images: Vitis leaves (left); maple leaves (right)

Images: Diospyros leaves (left), Parrotia leaves (right)

Images: Quercus coccinea leaves (left), the conifer Psuedolarix amabilis (right)

Fabulous fruits

There is a wonderful show of autumn fruits this year: some are edible for us, such as the hazel and sweet chestnuts, but many more are palatable for birds and mammals. I'm sure that for most people, the prime autumn fruit is the blackberry.
 

Image: Blackberries - a favourite autumn fruit

However, there are many fruits from around the world in our collections and now is the best time to see them. The fruits of the ash, called ‘keys’ because they resemble bunches of keys, the Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) whose fruits can be as big as tennis balls, and the smelly fruits of Ginkgo, are just a few to watch out for.
 

Images: Ash "keys" (top left), Osage orange (top right), Ginkgo biloba fruits (bottom)

Keep an eye out for the Sorbus fruits as well - especially the Kew hybrid with its white and pink contrasting fruits.

Images: Sorbus x kewensis fruits (left) and Sorbus forestii fruits (right)

- Tony -