Trees

By Helen Andre Cripps 10 October 2025 1min read

I was going to start the inaugural gardening blog with a piece about our wildflower meadows but listening to the machinery of the tree surgeons that are currently on site made me think that I should talk about the trees at Homerton.

We have around 600 trees on our 25 acre estate and I adore each and every one of them! I feel very protective over them all and it saddens me if any reach an old age and are so diseased that we need to fell them.

Within various excerpts from the pages of the book “Homerton: The Evolution of a Cambridge College edited by Peter Raby and Peter Warner” a history of the first trees at Homerton is found:

Homerton’s grounds were developed in the 19th century on open farmland and when Cavendish College was founded, in 1876, the landscape of these open country fields was almost devoid of trees.

When the Victorian spine of the College was built, in 1876, some of the older trees may have been planted. Amongst these is the English oak that stands by the Cavendish (little more than a sapling in a photograph from 1909).

It is believed that the avenue of limes (around 60) were planted in 1992.

One of the Purple Beech trees was planted in commemoration of King George V’s Silver Jubilee (1937).

The magnificent oak in winter outside the Cavendish building

The oak in summer

So in less than 150 years we now have a rich diversity of around 600 trees. We have inherited this early planting and have some wonderfully majestic mature trees as a result and I wonder how many cohorts of students have wandered under their canopies over those years.

Currently we have over 150 different species of trees within the grounds at Homerton, everything from Birches (Betula sp.) and Limes (Tilia sp.) to Giant Redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum) and “blue” Christmas trees (Picea pungens ‘Edith’).

Mix of Genus from the last survey in 2025

I have been having regular tree surveys carried out since 2020 primarily to check the health of the trees but some lovely data also arises about carbon storage, flood alleviation and pollution removal. Every tree survey creates a program of work that helps to keep us safe from tree damage and helps to keep the trees in the best possible condition. Sometimes a tree requires a more detailed survey and over the years a few trees have been subjected to:

Sonic tomography which involves an assessment of the consistency of wood in a tree by passing sound waves through the trunk and measuring how long they take to reach sensors placed around the circumference.

A resistograph is a micro drill used to measure the levels of resistance by drilling into wood to help determine its consistency. The results show high and low peaks for relatively high and low resistance.

Dynamic wind assessment uses inclination measurements under real life wind load conditions. Testing requires a period of sufficient wind gusts (usually 3-4 hours with gusts of 25kph or more) and the installation of an anemometer (on a 10m pole with guy ropes)

Wind Resistance Testing 11 & 12 Jan 2021

I hope people passing through Homerton enjoy the trees as much as I do. They are the answer to climate problems, create homes for countless creatures, offer shade and shelter and in my mind are quite magical.

It’s hard for me to choose a favourite but there is something extra special about the Copper Beech between the Queens Wing and the MAB lawn.