The Monterey Cypress at Bishops Knoll

The house whose garden this cypress grew up in has been gone for half a century, and its railings have not. Bishops Knoll Wood was once the grounds of The Knoll, a mansion built in the late 19th century for Peter Prankerd and demolished in the 1970s. The Monterey cypress still stands inside the Victorian ironwork that was put round it, a fence guarding a garden that no longer exists. It has grown into what the Bristol Tree Forum calls a colossal specimen. The Forum measured the trunk at 7.1 metres round, and the Woodland Trust, which now owns the wood, gives it a girth of over seven metres. The Forum's age is a piece of reasoning rather than a record. Monterey cypress reached Britain in 1839, and the Forum argues this one cannot have gone in earlier than 1860, which puts it somewhere around 150 to 170 years old. Nobody has a planting date. The species has a second claim on British gardens. The Forum points out that Monterey cypress is one parent of the Leyland cypress, the fast-growing conifer behind so many garden hedges. This is what one side of that family looks like when it is left alone for a century and a half. The wood is free to walk into from Bramble Lane. A giant coast redwood and a vast Austrian black pine stand in the same old grounds.