At the time I was devastated. You know
trees that you've been looking after that you'd grown to uh to to recognise
and be familiar with were, were lying on the ground.
Here we are in Kew Gardens, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Just south of London in the gardens we have
about 14 000 trees and an incredible diversity
representing all corners of the world. There's not been a storm like this in
the south coast counties for as long as anyone can remember.
Certainly the scale of the devastation hasn't been experienced since the second
World War. In 1987 on the 16th of October
we had a storm that came in from the southwest - very strong winds - that wasn't
really predicted. Houses and blocks of flats had their
roofs torn away, people were rescued by firemen from
buildings in danger of collapse, in the southeast of England alone we
lost 15 million trees in the space of about
an hour. And here at Kew we lost over 700. The
canopies were like the sail of a tree so the wind hit the canopies and
literally pushed them over.
The Turner's Oak was probably kingpin of the whole story.
This whole tree had been lifted out of the ground and we're talking about a big tree,
that would have been nearly 200 years old. The whole tree had lifted out of the ground and then sat
back so the whole root plate had come out
it had slightly tipped and leaned over. Before that
we knew that the tree had been slightly unwell but this was an opportunity to
save it and give it a last chance. We managed to push it back
and we propped it so the props are still under the tree to stop it falling over
again. And we decided that that would be the last
tree to cut up we would clear all the arboretum and then come back to that.
So three years later we came back to that tree -
picture of health and we just couldn't really understand why?
What we realised was over the years
people walking into that had compacted the soil around the roots. The root plate
was very compacted. i use a wine glass as a as an example of
a tree. The piece at the bottom, the base that sits on the
table and stops the wine glass falling over, is the root
plate of a tree. The root plate is very shallow. So on
that night, nature picked the tree up out of the
ground, shook the roots, back in and then lots of ferocity
in the soil so that the oxygen could get back down to the roots and
any water. And what we realised was that every other tree at Kew
was suffering from the same problem.
That was the start of a new era in tree management, not only at Kew
but in gardens across the world. Today over
the years, companies have developed machinery
specifically for soil injection and what we call air
cultivation. And from that came the airspade.
Trees are like people. Trees are moody they stress but they're
beautiful when they're happy. The golden rule that I got from the
storm was that you've got to copy nature and run with her and you'll
succeed. Whenever i walk past the Turner's Oak,
I always have a smile and a chuckle.
I'm getting a bit emotional now.
She's put more than a third of her growth on since the hurricane.
So I walk past her and pat her. stroke a leaf so she knows
i'm there. And thank her really.