Cambridge's remarkable trees live almost entirely inside college walls: a mulberry that grew back from its own roots after a 1795 storm, still fruiting from the tree Milton knew as a student, an apple tree grafted in 1954 from the specimen behind Newton's theory of gravity, and a plane grown from a seed a don carried home from the battlefield of Thermopylae. The Botanic Garden adds a redwood from the first seed shipped out of California and an oak that may be a one-off hybrid, all within a compact, walkable city.
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Foto: N Chadwick, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Newton's Apple Tree
Apple (Malus domestica) · 72 years · City centre
This is not Newton's apple tree, and it is genetically the same tree. The one he described stood at his family home, Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, and the falling-apple story comes from accounts he gave late in life rather than from anything in Cambridge. That original died around 1815 to 1820. Before it did, cuttings and grafts were taken and propagated onward as a genetically identical line, and in 1954 Trinity College planted one of them outside its main gate, directly below the room Newton lived in as a student.
So the tree in front of you is 72 years old and its tissue traces back, graft by graft, to the actual tree behind one of science's most famous stories. That is the whole reason to stop.
It is a 'Flower of Kent', an old English cooking variety, which means the fruit is edible and unremarkable: tart, disease-prone, nobody's choice for flavour. Newton would have known it as a kitchen apple rather than anything special.
It stands fenced for protection on Trinity Street, visible from the pavement outside the gate at any hour, and it is a five-minute walk from the older tree on this list, the Milton Mulberry at Christ's College, which was already grown when Newton arrived.
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Foto: Mr Ignavy, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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The Milton Mulberry
Black Mulberry (Morus nigra) · 417 years · City centre
James I wanted England to have a silk industry to rival France and Italy, and in the early 1600s ordered mulberry trees planted nationwide to feed silkworms. Christ's College planted one in its Fellows' Garden in 1608 or 1609, the year after the poet John Milton was born; by the time Milton arrived as a student in 1625, the tree was already established, and college tradition holds he spent time beneath it, though no contemporary record proves it directly. The silk scheme collapsed everywhere in England, partly because James's advisors specified the wrong species for silkworms to thrive on, but the mulberry outlived the industry it was planted for by well over a century. In 1795 a storm uprooted it completely. Rather than replace it with a sapling, the college's gardeners let it regrow from its own root system, and what stands today, propped on wooden posts, low and sprawling with trunks and branches poking out at odd angles from a raised mound, has been growing continuously from that same root for well over two centuries since. It still produces a real crop of mulberries each summer, which the college's gardeners harvest and turn into jam for the kitchens.
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The Oriental Plane of Jesus College
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 224 years · City centre
Edward Daniel Clarke, a Jesus College fellow and later Cambridge's first professor of mineralogy, spent the years around 1800 travelling through Greece, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, a journey that eventually filled six published volumes and made him one of the era's best-known explorer-scholars. In 1802, at Thermopylae, the narrow pass where three hundred Spartans and their allies held off the Persian army in 480 BC, Clarke collected seed from the plane trees growing there. He brought it home to Jesus College and had it raised into seedlings; one of them was planted in the Fellows' Garden the same year. Oriental Planes are long-lived, broad-crowned trees native across the eastern Mediterranean, and this one has had well over two centuries in an English college garden to put on size, now standing more than 25 metres tall. It is a genuinely unusual case among Cambridge's collected trees: not a symbolic gift or a scientific graft, but a seed one traveller happened to pick up at one of the most storied battle sites in Western history and carry home in his luggage.
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The Giant Redwood of the Botanic Garden
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · 171 years · Newtown
In 1852, the Cornish plant collector William Lobb reached Calaveras Grove in California and became one of the first Europeans to see Giant Redwoods growing wild, trees already thousands of years old and taller than anything in Britain. Recognising what he had found, he cut his expedition short and raced seed back to England for the Veitch nursery in Exeter, which was selling seedlings within a year, an unusually fast turnaround for a tree nobody in Europe had grown before. Cambridge University Botanic Garden was among the very first customers, planting out its own seedlings around 1855. Two of that original planting still stand on opposite sides of the garden's Main Walk near the fountain, and a third, at the junction with Henslow Walk, has grown into the tallest tree in the entire garden at just over 30 metres. Redwoods take centuries to reach the scale they are famous for in California, so at under two hundred years old this specimen is, by the standards of its own species, still young, a fast-growing adolescent rather than anything close to the giants Lobb originally found.
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The Cambridge Oak
Hybrid Oak (Quercus x warburgii) · 152 years · Newtown
Most oaks on this site are one of a small handful of well-known species. The Cambridge Oak is not: it is a hybrid, most likely a cross between the evergreen Quercus rugosa, native to Mexico and the southwestern United States, and Britain's own native Pedunculate Oak, a pairing that should not naturally occur an ocean apart and that appears to exist, in this precise combination, only here. It came from the Worcester nursery of Messrs Smith sometime between 1873 and 1875 and was planted in Cambridge University Botanic Garden soon after. By 1910, the tree had already earned a place in Elwes and Henry's authoritative survey The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland, which singled it out as the finest specimen of its kind in the entire country, a claim about a tree that may have been, functionally, one of a kind to begin with. It has grown considerably since, from under 12 metres tall in 1910 to nearly 17 metres with a 19.5 metre crown spread by a 2005 measurement, though a butt-decaying fungus now regularly fruits on its trunk each autumn, a visible sign of age and decline rather than imminent death. The garden has already grafted a younger replacement, planted near the Terrace Garden in 1991, as insurance for whenever the original eventually goes.
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