The Strawberries and Cream Tree

One trunk, two colours of blossom, and it is not two trees. A Kanzan flowering cherry was grafted onto wild cherry rootstock, and instead of one winning, tissue from both parents grew on together as a single tree. That makes it a graft chimera: pink Kanzan flowers along one side, white wild-cherry flowers along the other, open at the same time on the same trunk. It is one of only two cherry chimeras of this kind known in England, the other at Portchester in Hampshire. Nobody knows who planted it. It went into council land on Rodney Road in the late 1950s, an ordinary-looking street tree that turned out to be a botanical accident worth travelling for, and the children of Backwell gave it the name that stuck. Every spring since, the village has watched one tree flower in two colours. The last year has been hard on it. Council tree officers found it struggling after a long dry spell in 2025, and it now stands ringed by protective fencing keeping the traffic of an 800-home development off its roots, with mulching, a crown lift and deadwood removal scheduled. It is alive and being nursed rather than written off, and the fencing does not block the view. It is free and on a public road, nine minutes by train from Bristol Temple Meads to Nailsea and Backwell, then a short walk. Come in April: outside blossom season the whole point of the tree is invisible.