The Coast Redwood of the Great Dell

The Great Dell is a disused stone quarry on the northern edge of Royal Victoria Park's Botanical Gardens, planted out in the Victorian era with conifers that had only just started arriving in Britain from the west coast of North America and the mountains of South America. Coast Redwood seed first reached British growers in the 1840s, and the tree that now dominates the Dell, by far its tallest, is one of that first generation of plantings finding out how a California native would fare in an English quarry. It shares the space with an evergreen Monkey Puzzle from Chile and Argentina and English Oaks that predate the quarry's conversion into a garden, but the redwood is the one visitors notice first, its soft, fibrous red-brown bark rising well above the surrounding tree line before the ground was ever cut into a walkway. An aerial walkway now runs along the back of the Dell at canopy height, built so visitors can look across at the redwood's crown rather than straight up at its trunk from the quarry floor. It remains, by any measure taken here, the tallest tree in the whole of Royal Victoria Park.