The Chiswick House Cedars

On 20 May 1966 the Beatles spent the day among these cedars, filming the promotional clips for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Rain'. One of them, a cedar with a huge low limb, is known as the Beatles' cedar, and in 2025 it made the Woodland Trust's shortlist of ten for Tree of the Year. Whether it won, we have not been able to establish. The band were late arrivals. The Chiswick House and Gardens Trust, which owns the gardens, dates its oldest trees to the late 1720s, when William Kent first worked on the garden, and says several came directly from Lebanon. Other accounts put the planting at 1720, 1726, 1741 or 1745, one of them saying the trees came from Sutton Court, so the honest age is roughly three centuries with a couple of decades either way. Today an avenue of them frames the house. This entry is the group rather than one trunk. The cedars are spread across the grounds and our pin marks the gardens, not the Beatles tree itself. To find that one, go to the statue garden where the 1966 scenes were shot and look diagonally across for the low limb. The Trust notes that its cedars can drop branches without warning, and the ground under the famous one is roped off. The gardens are open daily, from dawn to dusk.