Jerry Spencer's mum worked at Kew Gardens. As a child he would go there to meet her at lunchtime. Leaving school he trained as a gardener. However a period of living on the streets after he lost his mum and his home, erased his gardening memories.

This is a beautiful and very personal plant story of the journey back to Kew and one special tree that played an important role in that journey.

Plants can trigger even the deepest most forgotten memories so join us as Jerry and I sit beneath the tree as he tells his plant story and then together we find out more about that tree from Simon Toomer Curator of Living Collections at Kew.

I love that Simon as a forester has a totally different time scale to many of us, thinking in tree years is perhaps a skill we should all cultivate.

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Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

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Welcome to our Plant Stories.

This is a story about a gardener who almost forgot that he was a gardener, until, that is, he encountered a rather special tree and that has led him back to a very special place.

Just being part of Kew Gardens is a great thing. I know my mum would be cheering in the background in some kind of way.

I'd like you to meet Jerry Spencer, a volunteer at the community allotment at Kew Gardens. And Kew is where we are meeting, but I'll let Jerry give you our exact location.

We're sitting beneath the famous tree that I remembered after so many years, which is a tulip tree, Latin name of Liriodendron tulipifera.

Tell me a bit about where you grew up.

So I was in Brentford in the tower blocks that you can see from the broadwalk here. And then When I was 11, we moved to Isleworth and then I sort of left school and went straight into gardening.

I applied for a job at Hounslow Council and started gardening with the council, so going to different parks all around the borough.

Do you remember what you liked about gardening at that time?

Just being outdoors. I loved being outdoors as a child. I was always out.

So, moving on from then, what happened?

After about 10 years, I stopped gardening and then got a job at Heathrow Airport. Then obviously the airline I was working for 9/11 happened, so I got made redundant from that job and then went on to do a bit of caring.

And then obviously my mum passed, which hit me really badly. And, yeah, that's when things started going really bad for me.

This was in 21, I'd just got a room in a hotel in Putney. So I was, you know, I was really raw and I sort of needed a bit of stability.

So I heard about this Explore program from a charity called Shepherd Star.

And then obviously I thought I'd try it because I saw in the program that they were going to Kew Gardens and my mum used to work at Kew Gardens, so I thought I'd love to sort of go back and see Kew Gardens again.

Did you come here as a child, if your mum worked here?

Yeah, yeah. I used to come and have lunch with my mum, have a wander around the gardens and, yeah, just really enjoy being outside. And what did your mum do here?

And what did your mum do here? What was her job?

My Mum was in the financial side, so yeah, she done all her sort of finance stuff to do with Kew. And I said one day I am going to come back to Kew Gardens in some kind of way. And she said, yeah, that would be really nice.

Jerry tells me he didn't really think he ever would come back to Kew. But then Jane Rogers, who is in charge of the community allotment, invited Jerry to become a volunteer.

And it was on a short horticultural course she was running that they took a walk and around the gardens.

And we came by where the lake is and it was like where the boardwalk part is and right at the end there was a tulip tree there and Jane said, oh yeah, here's a tulip tree. A flash come into my head of the name of it in Latin and I said, oh, that's the Liriodendron tulipifera. And Jane was like, oh yeah.

And I said, yeah, my brain is, is on form.

So then, yeah, certain things started coming flooding back to me and I thought, oh, it would be great to do that again, you know, just to have thoughts and see trees that I knew and knew the Latin of.

Do you think you'd forgotten that you were a gardener?

Yeah, yeah, because of, because obviously being on the streets, your world is so wrapped up of like you're constantly, well, I was constantly drinking and then leading on to quite hard drugs because you're just in a bubble. It's a daily routine and it's really hard to snap out of it. I've got quite an addictive personality.

So it's also about surviving though, isn't it?

Of course, yeah.

There's a saying actually on the streets that you sleep with one eye open, which is really, really true because you're constantly, obviously keeping an eye out for somebody trying to steal any, any of your stuff.

Yeah, you,just have to have that kind of, you know, literally one eye open so you don't get a lot of sleep and you're sort of, if you've still got drink from the night before or during the night, you start drinking again and then you're, you're back to square one doing exactly the same things.

So it's, it I was, you know, I wasn't in a sort of higher class but I'd always worked, so I was just a working class, you know, man, I never ever thought I'd go on the streets and I did and it was a massive wake up call.

Well, isn't it that they used to say that we're all one step away.

Yes, of course.

Any, anybody in any situation you think you're safe and you would never, ever get evicted from somewhere or, you know, you've only got to lose your job that you're in and then all these bills are starting, not getting paid and before you know it, you're homeless. And it's really, really hard, you know, very hard.

What is it that nature brings.

That when you go into somewhere like Kew Gardens, you forget about all your worries. You're just here to enjoy the amazing array of different trees, shrubs, plants that are all here and a part of the history of Kew Gardens.

You know, it's loads and loads of facts, figures and things that you can find out if you're really into gardening. You know, you never stop learning at Kew Gardens. There's always something new to learn.

I love Jerry's horticultural curiosity. Someone who, like me, has lot, lots of questions.

So we invited Simon Toomer, the Curator of Living Collections at Kew Gardens, to join us on the bench beneath the tulip tree. Do you want to do the first question, Jerry, because you had quite.

Yeah, yeah. I'd like to know obviously, I've got a little bit of a background with this tree that I sort of knew about.

I'd like to know obviously how long it would take for it to actually grow to its fullest to a tree this size.

Yeah, so they're quite, they're quite fast growing trees. So this one was probably planted around the middle of the 19th century, so it's probably about 170 years old.

I mean, they do get bigger than this in the USA, but this is a big one for the UK, so you can have a really pretty sizable tree within sort of 70 or 80 years because they do grow quite large. But this is, this is an exceptional one.

And where they actually originate from?

Yes, they've got quite a large natural range all down the eastern side of North America, really running right the way from quite far south, even down into northern Florida, I think, going right up the eastern side, right up into Canada. So it's got a big range and they're really forest trees. You know, we see them in parks here, but they're really a forest tree.

And if you go to the forests of eastern North America, you can see whoppers, you know, sort of 40 meter plus trees.

Yeah, I'd like to know as well that the, the wood from the actual tree itself, is it good for, you know, making like benches or tables and things like that. Can you use it for that?

Yeah, it's used for a wide range of things. It's one of these strange things. Very often people who work with wood call the wood a different name from the people who grow the trees.

And the wood of tulip tree often gets called poplar or yellow poplar or white poplar. Depends, varies a bit. And it's not a poplar, but the wood is a bit like poplar, they say.

But it's used for a huge range of things in America, everything from furniture making, I think, even musical instruments. I think piano parts have been made with tulip tree wood.

But it's also quite ornamental, so it can be used for ornamental uses, marquetry and things like that. But also quite functional buildings as well. So some of the old vernacular buildings were used. So, yeah, it's a really useful timber also as well.

The root system,you know, obviously trees have got massive underground root systems and does it have a big root system that's very, very wide?

Like most trees, the roots develop the way they need to. So the main function of roots is to get water. I mean, there's also anchorage in the soil.

So most trees don't go down a long way unless they have to, you know, unless there's deep sources of water. So if you think of a wine glass, it's got quite a shallow base and then a big, big sort of globe top.

Trees are more like that than they are a mirror image, you know, below the soil as above. And this would be similar.

So the roots will go out well beyond where we can see the branches stretching out to, but relatively shallow, so that the majority of the roots will be in the top meter. And that's because for most, most of their water supply they get from rainwater and they need to intercept that quite quickly.

So the roots are hugely extensive, stretching outwards. And there will be some roots that will go a bit deeper, but not many.

And that's one of the reasons why they're so easily damaged as well. You know, when you see people trenching around trees or driving around trees, they're actually quite fragile. So, yes, they tend to be quite shallow.

The tree itself obviously is covered in lichen, which is Jane Rogers favourite thing. Do they obviously like it on there?

To be honest, they don't care about lichens. Lichens are only there just using them as a surface. It's not like mistletoe or something that will be gaining nutrition from them.

The lichen is simply using it as a convenient place to sit. And lichens don't get very big.

I mean, there are some things that will get quite large, like ivy, which can, if it gets very extensive, can be a competition for the leaves, because obviously the leaves are there to trap the sunlight. So if they get shaded. But with lichens, that's not the case. So a bit of lichen doesn't do them any harm at all.

Fabulous questions, I have to say, and I love that root system. It's always fascinating, isn't it, to really envisage what is going on beneath the soil.

Yeah.

How many of these tulip trees do you have in Kew?

We've got around about just over a dozen, I think 13 or 14 tulip trees. But people will see more, and that's because in the last few years we've been planting a lot more of the Chinese species.

There's actually two species of tulip tree. They're both members of the magnolia family. They're closely related. And so there's another one called Liriodendron chinense.

This is called Liriodendron tulipifer, which says something about the flowers. And that's a Chinese species. And it's thought that they diverged in an evolutionary sense millions of years ago.

One part of the overall population remained in China, whereas the other one sort of drifted off with the continents in North America. And that's quite common, actually, in plants. You often see quite closely related species in different parts of the world.

That tells us quite a lot about their evolution. Rhododendrons is another example where you get North American rhododendrons and Asian rhododendrons.

Some of them are very closely related. It tells us quite a lot about the past of the Earth.

So how resilient will the tulip tree be as our climate changes? Do we know?

Yeah, we think it's one of the more resilient trees. And as I mentioned early on, it's got a very wide natural distribution.

So although we consider the North American tulip tree to be all one species, like a lot of plant species, it varies within that species. So actually, even the southern trees are adapted to a different climate from the northern trees.

And one of the things we've learned is that in order to be successful in selecting trees for the future, it's not just about the right species. It's very important about taking trees from a climate that more closely matches what our future climate will be.

So it may well be that some of the more southern trees that are more adapted to hotter, sometimes dry conditions may well be more suitable to Kew in the future.

I find that fascinating. So that's like saying you can't just say here's a species of tree that we know will be able to cope potentially. Within that species, you've then really got to search for the ones that are in that kind of similar, the climate that we think we're going to be coming towards and identify that one and propagate from that one.

Exactly. And foresters and horticulturalists call it provenance. So it's not just about species, it's actually about the particular provenance of that and all species vary to some extent, some more than others. And again, over millions of years they've adapted to be slightly different.

So although they're the same species and can interbreed, if you look at them at a population level, there are subtle differences, which means that their traits are slightly different.

That can be trait for adaptation to heat, to drought, to waterlogging, all sorts of characteristics that, that will make them particularly suited to their climate. And so that's exactly what we do.

You know, we do look for the ones that are going to be better suited to us in the future, particularly as conditions are changing very rapidly now.

Actually, I was going to ask, is there anything, you know, like with certain trees they've got or they're trying to find through medical reasons, you know, that there's certain bits. I think the silver birch is supposed to be linked to arthritis...

I don't know about the silver birch, but there's all kinds of pharmaceutical products that come from all kinds of plants, not just trees. And some of them are very traditional. So willow, for example, you know, gave us aspirin and. But certainly birch gives us all kinds of other things.

So in North America again, they drink birch beer, for example. Traditionally the bark was used for making canoes and all kinds of things, but particularly tropical plants. And we've got lots.

Kew Science are doing a lot of work on isolating some of the chemicals in a lot of our tropical collections, particularly for their cancer fighting properties. So that's a big area of work that we're doing in our science department.

When we talk about the climate changing and having to be aware of it, what kind of timescale do you put?

Well, it's happening already. You know, we often think, oh, it's going to happen, it is now happening.

You know, we notice for example, that we have to cut the grass for longer periods, you know, right into later in the autumn, earlier in the spring.

So we're looking particularly at trees because if you look around us at all these herbaceous plants and a lot of them are quite short lived and we can change them quite, quite frequently, you know, even if it's every 10 years. But if we were, for example, planting a tulip tree today, you know, it wouldn't be a beautiful specimen for at least 50 to 100 years.

You know, we know that. So you can't make snap decisions really.

You know, you need to think about what are the conditions that that tree is going to be experiencing when it's a grown up.

We have some really, we have a lot of, I mean even looking around here we can see trees from the Mediterranean region, we can see cedar trees, we can see Holm oak trees, evergreen oaks. They'll do very well, you know, in a few decades time as they do now.

Plants do have quite a latitude of tolerances and of course there's also levels of uncertainty.

You know, we don't know exactly how things are going to go, but we need to increase the level of confidence so that we make sure that at least a high proportion of the trees that we're growing and we're planting will do well so that we will have a beautiful landscape in 50 years time with lots of shade for people from the hot sun.

And even obviously Wakehurst, you've got obviously trees and things there, maybe even there, you'll see that there the growing rate is different probably and obviously, you know, because it's in a different area, they may grow better down there than here or, you know, so.

Now that's a really good point. And if you look down at the ground around our feet here, you can see it's very, very sandy.

If you were choosing the ideal place to grow trees, you wouldn't choose Kew Gardens. I mean, we're very lucky because we, we manage it very carefully and we're constantly feeding through composting.

But actually it's not a great soil for growing trees.

Whereas Wakehurst is much nicer and certainly for some of the moisture loving plants and some of the big conifers, they're much happier actually there than they are here.

So again, it's a really valuable thing about sharing with other gardens that you can do what works best for you rather than trying to do everything yourself. And that goes for Wakehurst, but it also goes for other plant collections.

For example, I was at the National Pinetum in Bedgebury in Kent two weeks ago and that was for their centenary because Bedgeberry pinetum was set up exactly 100 years ago.

And interesting it was at the time when the pollution in London was so bad it was killing a lot of the conifers. So Kew Gardens worked with the Forestry Commission to grow conifers in Kent, where the air was purer.

And Bean, the old curator, once said that any man working in the Pinetum would come out looking like a chimney sweep. Literally. He said if you rubbed up against any of the conifers, you would have be covered in soot.

And, you know, we can see from here the campanile, that grandly named chimney from the mid mid 19th century that would have been, that would have been along with millions of other chimneys in London spewing out smoke and soot at that time. So, yeah, it's a lesson to us all.

It kind of brings us to the How to Grow part of this podcast, which I always rather love really, which is, it's just obviously, I mean, I love the way when people talk about trees, you have a different time scale completely in one's head about how long, you know what I mean it's going to take. But say someone listening thinks, okay, I'd like to grow a tulip tree. Can I have it in a pot? Does it have to be in the soil? Where does it like to be?

What kind of conditions does it like? How would I grow a tulip tree? And which one would you grow?

Yeah, it's a relatively easy tree to grow, thankfully. I mean, it quite easily obtained from tree nurseries.

You can buy them, you can grow it in a pot as you can with anything, but it takes a lot more work in a pot because you've got to be you've really got to be on it in terms of watering. So as long as you've got a bit of space, I wouldn't advise growing in a pot for too long.

It's a tree that likes a reasonable quality soil and does need a fair amount of water, but most people can manage that and then good luck, you know, it'll grow itself. That's the great thing about trees, really.

Jerry and I learned so much from Simon sitting beneath that tree and I just wanted to share one final tip he gave us about planting trees.

Some people almost try too hard when they're planting trees. They try feeding them and giving them all kinds of sort of rotted manure and they really don't need that sort of thing.

They're quite happy with the soil as it is usually.

And what do you do by adding all that rotting manure? Does it kind of...

Well, it can be a problem because sometimes all you're doing is feeding the weeds and they've got quite modest needs, really. Most trees really, you know, they're quite happy and they grow quite slowly as well compared to many kinds of plants.

So they don't require vast amounts of nutrition.

So you said, if you planted it today, how many years do you think before you get it to start blooming? Because when they bloom, they are beautiful.

Yeah, they can take about 20 years to bloom, but I mean, if you've got enough money and you've got a space, you can buy a reasonable sized one. So knock off sort of five or six years. But yes, it's. well, like magnolias.

Magnolias usually flower earlier than that, but that's often because they're grafted trees and they are very similar to magnolias, as I say, they are in the magnolia family.

We've got to adjust our thinking, really, haven't we, to think in tree years rather than think sometimes what we do, which is a kind of short term, next month, next week, in the next hour, we've got to kind of, as humans have we got to kind of slightly adjust our time frame, do you think?

I think so.

I used to be a forester and I always thought I was inheriting the, you know, what people before me did and handing on to the next lot, you know, what I was doing. As long as each generation does something, there's always going to be a continual supply of beauty and trees.

Which feels like a lovely place to leave this conversation.

I'll put some more information about the tree and pictures of it on the website ourplantstories.com and if you're inspired to plant a tulip tree, do let me know. Remember, if you follow this podcast on your podcast app, you will never miss an episode.

And if you can take a couple of minutes to rate and review an episode, that'll help it to be recommended to other planty people who like podcasts. Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by me, Sally Flatman.