The Tulip Tree of the Bishop's Palace

By the Palace's own account, this tulip tree is almost 200 years old, a North American tree that has spent nearly two centuries growing beside the ruins of a medieval bishops' hall in Wells. The setting was made for specimen trees. When Bishop Law remodelled the Palace gardens in 1825 and 1826, he laid out a great lawn planted with them where the south wall of the Great Hall had stood, with the ruins of the hall as its backdrop. The tulip tree's age fits that date. No record we have found names it among his plantings, though, so read the age as the owner's claim rather than a documented date. Tulip trees are easy to pick out once you know the leaf. Each one is four-lobed with the tip cut off square, as if someone had taken scissors to it, a shape no native British tree has. In early summer the tree carries the cup-shaped flowers that give it its name, often high in the crown, and in autumn the whole tree turns gold and orange, which is when it stands out most clearly against the stone of the ruins. The gardens are behind a ticket, and the Palace publishes no girth or height for the tree.