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A Wellingtonia aka giant sequoia dominates the skyline at St Mary's church in Hardmead, Bucks. It's one of the oldest of its kind in the country. But how did it come to be there?

Put your feet up and enjoy a tall (but true) tale for #NationalTreeWeek ...
In the 1850s, California was in the grip of the Gold Rush. While thousands panned for gold, others made their fortune on plant discoveries. Cornishman William Lobb had brought Chile's monkey-puzzle tree to the UK (like this one here) and was looking for the next BIG thing …
The first European to document the giant sequoia was hunter Augustus Dowd, who stumbled into a grove of 96 huge trees at Calaveras Grove while pursuing a grizzly bear. Lobb heard his story in San Francisco and headed straight to the grove to collect seeds, cones and small trees.
Read 16 tweets
A recent tree survey of the churchyard at St Mary's, Hardmead reveals how this small, moated plot just northeast of Milton Keynes reflects the changing landscape of wild and cultivated Britain.
 
Herewith, a #thread for #NationalTreeWeek ...
After the last ice age, the warming climate made this land a welcoming home for yew, elder, holly, elm, and hawthorn. An Irish yew has joined its close cousin at Hardmead in more recent times, along with a Scottish pine.

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📸: Kristina D.C. Hoeppner
An ‘avenue’ of Sycamore grow along the path to the church — perhaps grown from saplings or seeds of much older sycamore trees at the rectory. We may think of the sycamore as a native species, but it only arrived on our island from central/eastern Europe in the Tudor period.

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