The Beech of Sydney Gardens

This beech may have started life as part of a hedge. The Sydney Gardens tree trail suggests it was one of a line of beeches planted around the Ride when the gardens opened in 1795, and that it simply never stopped growing. The hedge plant, if that is what it was, now stands 30 metres tall with a trunk 4.5 metres round. The hedge is an inference, and the trail is careful to present it as one. What it says with more confidence is that the tree is large enough to belong to the gardens' original planting, which would put it at something over 200 years old and, in the trail's words, among the oldest trees in the park. No planting record survives for it, so treat the date as a reading of its size rather than a fact on paper. If the trail is right, the beech went in for a Georgian pleasure garden and has stood on the same spot ever since, through the arrival of the Kennet and Avon Canal around 1800 and the Great Western Railway cutting from 1839, both of which run through the same gardens a short walk away. Its neighbours today are rather less grand. It stands near the entrance off Sydney Road, above the tennis courts. Two hundred years is a long life for a beech, a species that rarely reaches the ages of oak or yew. In late autumn it is the tree that turns this corner of the gardens copper.