A Map of Every Tree on My Street

It started as a way to learn their names. It ended as a map, a spreadsheet and an unexpected friendship with the neighbour at number twelve.

I should say at the start that I am not a botanist, or a gardener, or even someone who reliably keeps a basil plant alive. I live on Pellow Street, which is about four hundred metres long and slightly uphill, and until last March I could have told you that it had trees on it and not much else.

Fig. 2. Five of the forty-one, as they appear on the map. Drawing by Almanac.

Learning their names

The trigger was small. A friend visiting from out of town asked what the big tree outside my window was, and I said “a plane, I think”, and she said “you think?”, and I realised I had looked at it every morning for six years without knowing. So I bought a second-hand tree guide for £4 from the charity shop on the corner and started walking the street on Saturday mornings with it in my coat pocket.

The guide is from 1983. Its previous owner ticked off sixty-eight species and wrote “Ludlow, wet” beside the entry for alder. I have ticked off nine. I like to think we are on the same project, a few decades apart, and that they would forgive me for how slowly it is going.

What I learned early is that the book is only half the help. The other half is touching things, which feels faintly ridiculous on a residential street at nine on a Saturday. Lime bark is ridged, like old corduroy. Birch peels in papery strips that you are not supposed to pull off and I did, once, and felt terrible. Cherry has those horizontal bands across it, like a stack of coins, and a shine that looks polished. Hornbeam is smooth and grey and slightly twisted, as if someone has wrung it out.

Forty-one trees

There are forty-one trees on my street. I counted twice. This is how they break down:

If you add those up you get forty, which is the reason I counted twice. The forty-first is a sycamore about the height of my knee, growing out of a crack beside the postbox at the bottom of the hill. I am counting it on the grounds that it has survived two strimmings and a very dry August, and I think that earns it a place.

A note on the rules, since my sister has asked. I counted trees in the pavement, trees in the grass verge at the top of the hill, and trees in front gardens if their branches reached out over the pavement. I did not count hedges, or the enormous leylandii at number 41, which is technically a tree and which I have decided, for personal reasons, to ignore.

I drew them on tracing paper over an old street plan, one small circle each, and walked the street every weekend in spring to add notes: first leaf, first blossom, which ones the starlings prefer. The notes moved into a spreadsheet in May, after the tracing paper got rained on, and the spreadsheet now has nineteen columns, three of which I no longer understand.

Walking the street

Up the hill

Going up the hill from the postbox, odd numbers first. The sycamore. Then two planes, enormous, their roots lifting the pavement outside number 3 so badly that the slabs have been replaced with a lumpy patch of tarmac roughly the shape of a boot. A rowan outside number 7, which goes red in September and gets stripped by blackbirds in about four days. Three cherries in a row, planted together by the look of them, though one is clearly losing. Then the walnut, wedged between a garden wall and a lamp post, probably buried there by a squirrel around 2010 and now taller than the lamp.

Across the road

Across the road and back down: the limes, all six, which drip honeydew onto every parked car in July and are the reason the man at number 22 parks round the corner. The silver birches, which look ill and aren’t. The hornbeam, which I spent three weekends insisting was a beech. One of the mystery trees, outside number 18. Then number twelve, and her cherry.

You cannot pay attention to forty-one things at once. But you can pay attention to one tree, forty-one times. That is more or less what the walk became. Not a survey, just a slow lap of about twenty-five minutes where each tree got a moment.

You cannot pay attention to forty-one things at once. But you can pay attention to one tree, forty-one times.

I have done the lap at most hours now. The best is about eight on a Sunday in late April, when the cherries are out and nobody has moved their car yet. The worst is any weekday at half past three, when the primary school at the top of the hill lets out and I become, briefly, a man in a long coat staring intently at a lime tree outside a school gate. I have learned to carry the book where people can see it.

The three I can’t name

The tree outside number 18 is the one that bothers me most. Five-pointed leaves, but glossier than any maple I have found in the book, and bark with those coin bands that only cherries are supposed to have. In autumn it goes a deep wine colour, two weeks after everything else. I tried a phone app that identifies plants from a photograph. On three different days it told me the tree was a field maple, a sweetgum and “possibly a cherry”, which I could have told it.

The second is a small, many-stemmed thing in the verge near the top, with leaves that are silver underneath. A whitebeam, probably. But the man at number 39, who taught biology for thirty years, says “probably” in a way that makes me think he means “no”.

The third is outside number 33 and has leaves arranged in pairs along a stalk, like the rungs of a ladder. I thought ash. Then I thought rowan, but I have already counted the rowans and this is not like them. Three unknowns out of forty-one seems a fair proportion of mystery for one street.

Number twelve

The neighbour at number twelve came out one Saturday to ask why I kept staring at her cherry tree. Her name is Maureen Ashdown, and she asked in the tone people use for someone they suspect of planning an extension. When I explained, she went back inside without a word and came out with a shoebox.

She told me much later that she had assumed I was from the council, come to measure the tree before cutting it down, and had been rehearsing a speech for about a fortnight. She is seventy-one, worked for thirty years at the sorting office by the station, and has lived on Pellow Street since 1984. She knows who lived in every house before its current owners, and has opinions about most of them, all of which she shares on the condition that I don’t write them down. I haven’t.

The shoebox

It turned out she had planted the tree in 1988, the year her daughter was born, and had photographed it in every season since. Some years there are a dozen prints. Some years only one, usually in April. In the earliest it is a stick tied to a cane, with a pram parked beside it. By 1996 it is taller than the front door. In 2007 a storm took a large branch off the left side, and you can watch the tree spend the next five years quietly evening itself out.

In 2007 a storm took a large branch off the left side, and you can watch the tree spend the next five years quietly evening itself out.

There are a hundred and eighty-six prints, dated on the back in blue biro, mostly from a camera she still owns and no longer uses. In one, from the winter of 1991, the tree is bent nearly double under snow and her daughter, Claire, is standing beside it in a red hat looking furious about something. In another, from 1999, a man is up a stepladder with a pair of loppers, pruning a council tree without permission. That is her husband, Ray, who dug the original hole.

There is a gap in the box from 2014 to 2021. She didn’t explain it and I didn’t ask. Ray’s coat is hanging on the hook in the porch in a photograph from 2013, and it isn’t there in any of the later ones.

We have since been through the whole box at her kitchen table, twice, with tea and a packet of ginger biscuits she says are for visitors. She has started photographing the tree again, now on her phone, and sends me the pictures, which go into the spreadsheet in a column called “Maureen”. It is the only column I am certain I understand.

The council’s records

In June I found out that the council publishes its own list of street trees, as a spreadsheet anyone can download. It is the least romantic document I have ever been moved by. Pellow Street has thirty-seven entries. Two of them are trees that no longer exist: one is now a stump outside number 26, ground flat in 2017, and the other, as far as anyone on the street can remember, was never there at all. The walnut is not listed. Nor is the sycamore by the postbox. The council’s list also has a column for “amenity value”, and the bigger of the two planes outside number 3 is valued at forty-eight thousand pounds, which made me look at it differently and worry slightly more about the boot-shaped tarmac.

Maureen’s cherry is in it too, recorded in a single row:

Cherry. Planted 1991. Condition: fair.

Council street tree list, Pellow Street

She was not pleased about either. She wrote to the tree officer, a man called Gareth Linnell, enclosing a photocopy of the 1988 picture with the pram. He replied within a fortnight, corrected the date, and kept “fair”, which she has decided to respect as a matter of professional integrity. I wrote him an email about the walnut and then deleted it without sending.

What the map shows

A few things the map has taught me:

• The planes come into leaf last and hold their leaves longest.

• The starlings like the limes.

• The council pruned four trees in November and did not touch the walnut, which I take to mean it is still a secret.

The map itself is now on a sheet of A2 cartridge paper pinned up in my hallway. Each tree is a circle sized by its canopy, which I measured by pacing underneath with my arms out, so the sizes are honest but not accurate. The three unknowns are left blank. The cherry outside number twelve has a small “M” next to it, which Maureen asked for and then pretended she hadn’t.

In October I photocopied it at the library, forty copies at ten pence each, and put them through letterboxes with a short note. Three people replied. One told me that the mystery tree outside number 18 was planted by the previous owner of the house, who bought it from a nursery in Wales and never knew its name either. One asked whether I could do the next street. One just wrote “thank you” on the back and posted it back through my door.

I will count again in March. I expect it to be forty-one. If the sycamore by the postbox has gone, I will be more upset than is reasonable.