Mapping our trees & shrubs

One of the early objectives of the HPF Committee is to catalogue and understand the hundreds of trees and shrubs contained in Hedgemead Park.

To this end, five of us spent a happy two hours yesterday in the company of Botanist and Chair of the Friends of Henrietta Park, Henry Ford, who agreed to join us for a tour of the park.  Henry helped us to identify some of the most notable specimens, which we intend to include in our database of flora.  Many thanks Henry!

The local community can be justifiably proud of the variety and quantity of trees. The Management Plan for Hedgemead Park states that we have around 280 individual specimens made up from 29 genera.  Six of these are classed as ‘Champion’ trees and recorded in the tree register for Great Britain and Ireland. And that’s just the trees; there are a large number of very interesting and quite exotic shrubs too.

Given the park’s Victorian heritage, many of the trees are 130 years old, planted in 1889 in order to stabilise the ground following the series of landslips in the 1870s and then in 1881 and 1883, that resulted in the land being cleared and repurposed as a ‘pleasure garden’.