Logs, trees and London Boroughs

 A cold and frosty day in Shropshire. Too cold and frosty to be doing anything much outside today, even if I hadn’t succumbed to the village bug a few days ago.

When I was a boy gardener working for a variety of London Boroughs over the years, and wasn’t suffering from a village bug, winter was when you abandoned the parks to carry out work on the trees in the local streets.

Nowadays I tend to get the logs I burn to keep the house warm in winter already cut to size and barn dried, so they burn well.

When I was working for local authorities, and burning the logs I gathered during the course of my work to make the coal last longer, what I burned was dictated by what trees were growing in the streets there and none of the authorities I worked for at the time had ever planted Ash or Beech, generally considered to be the trees which produce the hottest burning logs.

There were large London Planes, planted around the turn of the twentieth century, which had thick branches requiring regular pollarding and lopping to keep them under control. The logs they produced were heavy and smoked a lot.

There were also Lime Trees, which were planted after the Second World War and hadn’t got big enough to produce very big logs in any volume at the time. Not enough to do more than mix them in with your other logs and not really know how they added to, or detracted from, their burning.

After the onslaught of Dutch Elm Disease in the 1960s, there were any number of Elm tree logs to be had, and they didn’t burn too badly as long as the supply lasted. Eventually though, there were no more standing elms left to cut down. The ones which had been standing dead the longest before being cut down burned quite well as a result.

In the garden, look out for a tree planted as a street tree in one London Borough, in Chiswick, I believe, though it wasn’t at all suitable really. Adding a touch of the exotic when it was, though. Robinia pseudoacacia, the False acacia, or Locust. A fast growing deciduous tree, with dark green leaves made up of oval leaflets and dense drooping clusters of pea-like white flowers borne in late spring and early summer. It also had thorns as I recall. Large ones.