Two annual events coming up:

Sunday 1 September:  two walks as contributions to Friends of Brompton Cemetery – Tree Walk, starting at 11.30 a.m., and Wild Flower Walk, starting at 1.30 p.m.

Report:  Although the other walks and tours attracted large attendances, the two plant walks were much less popular, with 10 participants joining the tree walk, and 6 the wild flower walk.  The latter also suffered from there being very few wild flowers to examine and discuss.  None-the-less, participants seem to have enjoyed the hour spent examining trees, and the 40 minutes discussing wild flowers.

Saturday 7 September:  Herbal Heritage walk around St Leonard’s churchyard, Streatham, starting at 11 a.m.; a contribution to the Lambeth Local History Fair. Fully booked.

Report:  20 people had booked for this walk and about that number turned up to slowly walk around the churchyard discussing the uses of some of the plants found there.  Most of these plants were native, such as the yew, Taxus baccata, near the church entrance, where we stopped and discussed the edibility of its arils.  But the last plant, New Zealand Flax, Phormium tenax, was introduced to Britain in 1789, in the hope that it would be a useful fibre plant.  Although cultivated on the Isle of Man and the Isles of Scilly, Phormium never became an important fibre-plant in Britain; more recently it has become appreciated and widely grown as a hardy ornamental.

For further information see the Events page on this website.

Images:  upper, Oregon, or big-leaf, maple, Acer macrophyllum, native to western North America, growing in Brompton Cemetery, and mentioned by Elinor Wiltshire in her ‘Uncommon trees in London’ in The London Naturalist 46, pp.37-66, 1997; lower, St Leonard’s churchyard, both September 2024.

Edited 4 July 2025.