The Champion Whitebeam of the Botanics

Sorbus hemsleyi is a whitebeam from central China, rare enough in cultivation that the Tree Register of the British Isles lists a single UK and Ireland champion for the species by trunk girth, and it grows here, a few paces from the garden's other rare whitebeam, the Catacol whitebeam saved from extinction by grafting cuttings onto rowan rootstock. This tree came from seed collected under accession SABE 1317 and went into the ground in 1981, a young tree by the Botanics' standards, not yet fifty, in a collection that includes trees planted two centuries earlier. What it lacks in age it makes up in rarity: whitebeams hybridise and speciate readily, throwing up dozens of narrow endemics found on a single hillside or gorge, and Sorbus hemsleyi's presence here, thriving enough in an August 2023 photograph to still hold its champion title, belongs to the same conservation instinct behind the garden's Catacol grafts a short walk away. It carries white flowers in spring and orange red berries by autumn, ordinary whitebeam fare, but the specific tree, its girth on record with Britain's tree registry, is what makes it worth finding. Free to see, in the same eastern corner of the garden as the John Muir Grove and the Handkerchief Tree.