The Tulip Tree, Liriodendron tulipifera

Tulip Poplars, as Americans call them, are common growing wild as tall slender trees competing for light in wooded areas among other deciduous trees. There are also impressive stand-alone examples in fine gardens, offering in spring subtly coloured flowers of light greens and oranges just visible between the big cut form leaves that turn golden in autumn sunshine. Such single trees can grow very large with age, as much as sixty metres in height with trunks of up to three metres in diameter. This is another native of south eastern coastal America, another collected in the mid to late seventeenth century to bring to Britain.

Here, the Tulip Tree as it is usually called in Britain, is one of those that lends itself to becoming ‘important’. It is not often a grove tree but planted as a ‘specimen’ as a quick online trawl makes evident. Botanic gardens take pride in their specimens: Kew has one known as a Heritage tree planted in 1770; Oxford boasts of old specimens; Westonbirt, the National Arboretum, outdoes them both, with twenty-five of what are referred to as ‘signature’ trees within a heritage landscape. There are others at Keele University and at Chiswick House in west London as well as in the Inner Temple Gardens.

What brings the Tulip Tree home to Essex is the discussion put online by Mill Hill School named ‘Re-creating Peter Collinson’s Garden’. Located at the Ridgeway in London NW7, the school has been established on the site of the home of that early and eminent plant collector and botanist, one of those instrumental in distributing tulip trees and other American exotica in England. Collinson, 1694 -1768, became an adviser to Robert Petre, the 8th Baron Petre of Essex, whose early and devoted interest in botany resulted in his planting an enormous collection of trees in the park of his Thorndon Hall estate. Lord Petre also had constructed great glasshouses or ‘stoves’ to propagate seeds and nurture seedings as through Collinson he had become a subscriber to special stock selections sent from American gardeners. Among those were tulip trees as well as other colourful species. What an ambition he had, to have planted thousands of trees carefully chosen to harmonise in colour and form. What a botanic dream lost when he died at the age of just twenty-nine and his groves were neglected and even his library of books and specimens were dispersed.

Nowadays the choice of a tulip tree to adorn a wide lawn is quite common. The Gibberd Garden has two specimens which if time is allowed and our changing climate enables will have the opportunity to grow fine and large under Essex skies. They will not bloom until they reach a mature age, from about twenty-five years. There are other examples at Audley End and elsewhere.

As with other American varieties found by English settlers and hailed as originals for botanical classification and export, the tulip tree had been used and valued for all the gifts that it offered in many preceding centuries by Native Americans. Early peoples valued the fine wood for building and felled logs for hollowing out to make canoes; from the bark and roots were extracted tonics and remedies; the tree’s strength and beauty was venerated. Trees were seen as independent cohabitants of the woodlands in which they lived. Ethnobotanists are beginning to understand and respect these attitudes.

In Britain, eighteenth century society valued the rarity of American trees and rarity requires funds, so in a hierarchical society, estate owners bought the stock as well as the expertise of the scientific collectors and the gardeners that it took raise them in a foreign landscape. Those great fortunes that used imagination to create large enviable estates have for the most part not survived. The society our more democratic state has produced has preserved the great planted landscapes through the National Trust and other institutions and the knowledge has followed, allowing the science to develop through botanic gardens and universities.

Though gardens are smaller and not many of us have room for a Tulip Tree, such exotic varieties are available to be admired on garden visits and, when the right spot is located, brought home from a garden centre.

See the Garden Heroes article Lord Robert James Petre (1713 -1742) published by the Essex Gardens Trust.

Images: Herbararia.plants.ox.ac.uk; Tulip poplar, University of Kentucky Department of Horticulture; Liriodendron tulipifera, University of Cambridge Botanic Garden; Tulip tree leaf, Oxford.