Category: photography

Canonbury’s heritage mulberry

By Peter Coles

Tudor Canonbury Tower
The hidden black mulberry

Canonbury, that sedate corner of urban tranquillity just two miles due north of St Paul’s cathedral, is home to more curiosities than many parts of London. Some are well known, like the delightful, exposed stretch of the New River, a project started in 1602 and completed in 1613, to bring drinking water to central London from the River Lea near Ware in Hertfordshire (see also our article linked to Sir Hugh Myddelton, who oversaw the project).

And then there is Canonbury Tower – a very unusual Tudor brick tower built between 1509 and 1532 by Prior William Bolton of St Bartholomew’s Priory in Smithfield (on the site of St Bartholomew-the-Great). The Tower was part of his redesign of the extensive 13th century Canonbury Manor, which belonged to the canons of St Batholomew’s. This once covered all of today’s Canonbury Place, including a large park and gardens, complete with an octagonal house – another Canonbury curiosity, which can still be see today in Alwyne Villas.

canonbury house and tower

But few are aware that, hidden in a private garden behind the tower and the adjacent Canonbury House, is a sprawling, gnarled, black mulberry tree that might turn out to be one of the oldest in London.

20180225-_DSF1452_CanonburyTowerMulberry-Pano-Edit_small
The sprawling black mulberry may be over 400 years old
Canonbury_mulberry_2018-02-25_iphone
The gnarled and collapsed old trunk is hollow and split

A 16th century skyscraper

Canonbury Tower is fascinating in its own right. When Henry VIII seized Canonbury Manor during his Dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, it eventually passed down to his First Minister, Thomas Cromwell, who oversaw the Dissolution. Cromwell lived here for a year before his fall from grace and execution in 1540. In 1570 the Mansion passed to Sir John Spencer, a favourite of Elizabeth I, who became Lord Mayor in 1590. In the early 1600s, Sir Francis Bacon lived here and, later, Oliver Goldsmith.

The Tower has some extraordinary carved fireplaces, Tudor cubbyholes and a dark, oak-panelled room with a few remnants of the paraphernalia of freemasonry. Much of the Masonic symbolism added to the wood carvings and decorations was commissioned by Spencer, who was a prominent Rosicrucian. On Spencer’s death in 1610, the mansion passed down to his son-in-law, William Compton, Earl of Northampton, who had eloped with Spencer’s daughter, Eliza, who was hiding in a bread basket lowered from an upstairs window. The Manor has passed down in the Spencer-Compton family ever since and is still owned by the Marquess of Northampton.

Spencer was a friend of Francis Bacon, the philosopher and parliamentarian under both Elizabeth I and James I, who came to live at Canonbury Manor from 1616-25. Like Spencer, Bacon was a Rosicrucian, and the first Grand Master of modern English Freemasonry. The Tower became the home of the Masonic Research Centre from 1998-2012.

The oldest mulberry in London?

Did any of these illustrious early residents plant the mulberry tree? If so, it could be anywhere between 400 and 500 years old, placing it in the ranks of the oldest surviving mulberries anywhere in England – and certainly the oldest within walking distance of the City. There are very old mulberries in the ancient orchard at Syon House, which are also thought to be 16th or at least 17th century. Old mulberries were noted there in 1548 by William Turner, the botanist and apothecary to Lord Somerset who inherited the Bridgettine monastery after the Dissolution and built a house there. But, although well inside the M25,  Syon House is in Brentford, 13 miles away from the City. Meanwhile, another very old mulberry at Charlton House, which is thought to date from 1611, is 7 miles from the City.

Hollow and split trunk at Canonbury
Hollow trunk

Could the Canonbury mulberry really be Tudor and as old, or older, than the Syon House trees? It is impossible to tell for sure, without invasive analysis. But it does share many of the hallmarks of a very old tree: It has collapsed and much of the trunk is lying horizontally. Branches trailing along the ground have started to grow upwards like new trunks, some distance from the original bole. The core of this bole is hollow and split, with the familiar burrs of a black mulberry, making it very difficult to measure its girth to assess its age.

There is a black mulberry at Hatfield House that was possibly planted by John Tradescant when he was Head Gardener from 1610-15, but may well pre-date him by fifty years, as it has also been attributed to Princess Elizabeth, when she lived there before becoming queen . The Hatfield mulberry, though has been pollarded and, while hollow, is squat and not leaning or lying down.  Meanwhile, Christ’s College, Cambridge has records of purchasing and planting black mulberry trees in 1608. One of these – the celebrated ‘Milton mulberry’ – survives on a mound in the Fellow’s Garden and shares several features with the Canonbury tree.

There is, then, every possibility that the Canonbury mulberry is very old – the walled garden where the tree stands features in old plans of the Manor. Prior Bolton seems to have been familiar with mulberries and may have planted one or more at St Bartholomew’s Priory, which he rebuilt. There are records of a very old mulberry tree still surviving in the 19th century, adjacent to St Bartholomew-the-Great (with remains of the Priory) and some evidence for a mulberry garden next to the Infirmary.  There is a fine mulberry tree there today, although not more than 100 years old, but it does symbolise the ancient connection.

Another possibility is that Francis Bacon planted the Canonbury mulberry. Bacon was a cousin of Robert Cecil, son of William Cecil, the powerful Lord Burghley in the reign of Elizabeth I.  Robert was responsible for rebuilding the Tudor Hatfield House and gardens in the Jacobean style. James I had persuaded Robert to accept the Old Palace and manor at Hatfield in exchange for the splendid Theobalds, which Robert had inherited from his father.  We know that around 1611 Robert sent his gardener, John Tradescant, abroad to bring back mulberry saplings. He apparently planted around 500 at Hatfield, as part of James’s sericulture project, though only one survives today – and that is a corner feature of the Tudor knot garden, not apparently a vestige of a plantation. Robert Cecil and Bacon were not exactly on friendly terms, but Tradescant may have had a mulberry going spare for Bacon to plant at Canonbury – if there wasn’t one there already….

__________________

Thanks to Nicola and Gavin Ralston for inviting me to look at the tree. Nicola is writing her own account of the tree for the Canonbury Society, due out in March-April 2018.

 

London is home to rare Black Poplars

2016-08-11 19.22.53.jpg
Native Black Poplar on the banks of the River Lea at Hackney Marshes

There are only about 7000 native Black Poplars (Poplus nigra betulifolia) left in Britain, most of them south of The Wash (the bay where Norfolk meets Lincolnshire on the east coast of England). And only 600 of these are female. These females produce a cottony fluff when the seeds are ejected to be carried by the wind. As this can be a nuisance, local authorities and forestries have planted male trees. The result is that the native population has declined, rarely reproducing through seed and mostly by suckering and sending up new trunks if a tree falls over. Added to this, the draining of wetlands for development has meant that any fertile seed is unlikely to fall on the silty damp soil it needs to grow into a tree. The last blow to the native wild Black Poplar is that it easily hybridises with non-native species, like the Lombardy Poplar or the Cottonwood of North America.

On Thursday evening this week I led a small group to find the Black Poplars along a stretch of the River Lea beside Hackney Marshes – a large, flat grass space that is laid out for football pitches, used for training. There are as many as 20 mature Black Poplars here, some along Homerton Road as street trees, the others on the river bank in a beautiful, natural setting. Walking by the river, with swans and cygnets, anglers and limpid fresh water, it is hard to remember that you are less than ten minutes’ walk from the hipster bars of Hackney Wick and what used to be (before the 2012 Olympics) an industrial area of North London. The only “downer” on our walk was when we approached a line of Traveller caravans in order to get to the footpath by the river and co-leader Andrew was bitten on the leg by a nasty little dog.

2016-08-11 19.53.09.jpg
Walking back across Hackney Marshes football practice pitches in the evening light

London mulberry project

In May this year the Conservation Foundation launched a new project called Morus Londinium that I helped to put together. From now until the end of next year I will be writing regular blogs for their website.  The idea is to document and preserve London’s mulberry tree heritage and to research the stories behind some of the older ones, which are sometimes survivors of a past that has disappeared under urban development.

My latest post is on the mulberries of Cadogan Place Gardens, on the edge of Chelsea.

14-Cadogan-Mnigra-20160619-DSF6176

 

London’s mulberry heritage

The Morus Londinium project on London’s mulberry tree heritage and its heritage mulberries is now up and running.  We are carrying out the most comprehensive survey of London’s mulberry trees, with an interactive online map for anyone to add trees they know of, or learn about trees all over London. I am editor and researcher for the project.

 

 

 

 

 

Shepherd’s Purse

Image

Shepherd’s Purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris) is flowering now in the cracks between paving stones and alongside garden walls in my suburbia. It’s the little seed pods though, not the flowers, that have endeared them to me since childhood in more rural Buckinghamshire. A little plant with dozens of hearts on stalks. But the plant gets its Latin and common English name from the resemblance of these seed pods to the purses that hung from the belts of peasants in the Middle Ages. The French name is Bourse-à-pasteur, which also means a shepherd’s purse. And when the pod is ripe, it splits open and little seeds spill out, like coins. The Dutch painter, Pieter Breugel, included one in his The Peasant Dance, painted around 1567.

Image

In his inspiring book, Weeds, Richard Mabey points out that the seeds are covered with a kind of gum, which, when moist, helps them to stick to the feet of birds, increasing their chances of dispersal. Also, according to Mabey, the resemblance of the seed pods to bladders meant that they were once thought to be an effective cure for urinary disorders – following the theory of plant ‘signatures’ put forward by the 17th-century Oxford botanist, William Coles.

In Flitting, written in 1832, the poet John Clare declares his love for the “poor persecuted weeds”  which, he points out, will still remain “where old marble cities stood.”  He composed the poem shortly after he, his wife and seven children moved to the village of Northborough (“this strange spot”). Although not far from his birthplace in the village of Helpston (“that old hut now left), he felt increasingly alienated, with bouts of severe depression. In the poem, simple weeds around his new home remind him of his beloved Helpston.

A farm worker himself, he wrote of shepherd’s purse:

E’en here my simple feelings nurse
A love for every simple weed
And e’en this little shepherd’s purse
Grieves me to cut it up – Indeed
I feel at times a love and joy
For every weed and every thing
A feeling kindred from a boy
A feeling brought with every spring.

And why – this ‘shepherd’s purse’ that grows
In this strange spot in days gone bye
Grew in the little garden rows
Of that old hut now left – and I
Feel what I never felt before
This weed an ancient neighbour here
And though I own the spot no more
Its every trifle makes it dear.

 

 

Green mist

Image

That time of Spring has come, when the bare Winter bones of twigs and branches in the woods are clothed in a thin green mist, as buds open into the most fragile and greenest-of-green new leaves. In a month the whole woodland will have changed and it will no longer be possible to see far.

Magnolia

kenwood and fitter magnolias_blogpost (1 of 1)

It’s odd that the blossoming of a tree that is native to the Himalayan mountains should herald Spring in suburban London, but that is what the magnolia does. And this one on the slope on the south side of Kenwood House is particularly splendid. It is now in full flower, on 16 March. In 2009 it was at the same state of blossom on 24 March and last year, 2012, it did not bloom  until after 2 April, according to the newsletter of the Friends of Kenwood.

The tree was probably planted in 1925, or shortly after, when the house was bought by Edward Cecil Guinness, First Earl of Iveagh. Arthur Oxford was appointed first head gardener that year. When  Guinness died in 1927, he bequeathed the house to the nation.

In March 2009, shortly after the birth of my second son, I went up to the south terrace of Kenwood almost every day to photograph the tree in full bloom. For several days I went home without a picture because the flowers weren’t completely out yet.

In 1945 the famous bird photographer, Eric Hosking, had taken a photograph of the magnolia at almost exactly the same time of year, for R.S.R. Fitter’s endlessly interesting book, London: A Natural History, published in 1947. What’s interesting in Hosking’s photograph is the oak tree to the left of the magnolia, with a bench around it, on which sit   visitors to the grounds. The tree is no longer there.

Hosking, who famously had an eye pecked out by an owl as he climbed into a hide to retrieve his camera, was the anonymous photographer of the swan that was used for the drawing n the Swan Vestas matchbox.

swan vestas