At 955 ha, Richmond Park, a national nature reserve, is the largest urban park in Europe and by far the largest of the eight London parks managed by the Royal Parks, an independent charity established in 2017 to support and manage 2,000 ha of parkland. It offers visitors a taste of the countryside in the capital – and quite different experiences, depending on the time of year.
A seven-mile wall surrounds this enclosed park. Every year, between five and seven million visitors explore the semi-natural landscape, with its mosaic of habitats, grassland, wood pasture, open woodland and enclosed plantations, and a fair sprinkling of water bodies.
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On a mild half-term afternoon in Richmond train station, a volunteer at the Visit Richmond helpdesk advises which bus to take (371) and the appropriate stop (American University). Entering through Richmond Gate, roads, tracks and paths lead left and right. All are busy with vehicle, cyclist and pedestrian traffic, and it is slightly overwhelming.
Turning right on the Tamsin Trail leads uphill to King Henry’s Mound. At 57.4 metres above sea level, the park’s highest point is the place to view St Paul’s Cathedral 10 miles to the east. To the west, this vantage point offers views over the cedars and limes in Petersham Park and out towards Heathrow, Windsor Great Park and the hazy Surrey Hills.
With approximately 120,000 trees, Richmond Park has many woods. Not every woodland, plantation, clump and copse is accessible. Each is managed according to its end-user needs, be it maintaining habitat for wildlife, for deer or for people.
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The nearest to King Henry’s Mound appears to be Sidmouth Wood (P/Enclosed 1823). Walking ‘The Avenue’, a 16.5-metre-wide ride lined with veterans, ends at locked gates, at the top of Sidmouth Ride. Literally labelled ‘The Way’ in sculpted letters, these gates were installed to mark 300 years of the ‘protected view’ to St Paul’s, and any foliage threatening to encroach the vista frame is pruned back with loppers annually.
Sidmouth Wood comprises two plantations, each surrounded by metal security fencing to protect a wildlife sanctuary (roost site for brown long-eared bats) from browsing visitors. An enclosed path (fences on either side), accessible through a metal gate, is shady, people-free and quiet, aside from the squawks of green ring-necked parakeets.
A notice from the Friends of Richmond Park, 3,000 members strong, invites visitors to join the park’s ‘green gym’, creating and clearing glades, clearing invasive Rhododendron ponticum, or planting native trees to improve the woodland’s age structure. Rhododendron ponticum has mostly been eradicated, save where pockets grow over badger setts.
The metal-gated exit leads into wood pasture at the northern tip of Queen Elizabeth’s Plantation.
Veteran (possibly ancient) oaks, with their stumpy hollow stems of massive girth, support lumbering ex-pollard branches that twist and curl out and over tangles of roots, stumps and limbs that have split, failed and dropped. Deadwood left where it lands to dissemble on the pasture floor is an unusual sight in an urban park.
Richmond Park hosts the fifth-largest population of veteran trees in England – veteran trees are classified as such for their cultural, landscape or nature conservation value courtesy of their age, size or condition – and these were saved from being felled for ship (or house) building by royal protection. Of the 1,156 vets, 993 are living and 163 are dead. Alive or dead-and-decaying oaks support 2,300 species of plants and wildlife and fungi, and the park holds a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) designation for the diverse deadwood fauna (beetle habitat) associated with these trees, as well as a special area of conservation designation for the stag beetle. Over 1,000 beetle species have been recorded throughout the park.
MARCH
On a sunny working day in March, heading from Richmond Gate towards the park offices at Holly Lodge to meet park manager Paul Richards, two small silhouettes are overheard discussing reductions amid the jumble of logs lying beneath the bare canopies of a publicly accessible clump of tall oaks. A van parked at roadside is emblazoned with ‘The Tree Company’ (TreeCo) logo.
On Sawyer’s Hill, a production crew assembles scaffolds for use on a two-day action-movie film shoot, perhaps taking advantage of distant city views.
In the stable yard behind Holly Lodge, the TreeCo’s Richmond Park works team supervisor Adam Hansbury offers an insight into its work for the Royal Parks. “We are on site most of the year and the tree work varies, balancing tree health with public health and safety. We might be pollarding willows along the Beverley Brook, or on Sawyer’s Hill discussing 20-per-cent reductions of specific limbs that might shed.”
The team has just completed a package of works in Queen Elizabeth’s Plantation, haloing around veterans to provide more light, ensuring that they continue to grow. “The end goal for the trees that we prune to halo the veterans is that they will hopefully become vets themselves.”
Fresh from meeting the local MP, Paul leads the way east towards Sheen Gate. Pausing in the ocean of parkland near a stubby-boled oak with a gracefully spreading bare crown, he says: “This is Sir David Attenborough’s favourite oak, around 800 years old. It would have been pollarded. You can also see the deer browse line. It is similar on most of our trees.”
Paul joined the Royal Parks in April 2022 from the London Borough of Hillingdon. Growing up just beyond Sheen Gate, he thinks that playing here throughout his childhood probably set him on his horticultural career path, studying first at RHS Wisley and then at RBG Edinburgh.
Richmond Park’s in-house parks team is divided in two; ‘Arboriculture and Landscape’ (tree inspections and liaising with contractors, and landscape architects working on infrastructure projects to improve accessibility) and ‘Grounds Maintenance’ (tractor drivers and contractors who manage Isabella Plantation and the grounds at Pembroke Lodge). “In general, the Royal Parks is looking to in-source grounds maintenance by bringing Gavin Jones in-house in September.”
Further in-sourcing initiatives include employing two head gardeners (for Isabella Plantation and Pembroke Lodge) and an apprentice technical officer to manage the wider estate.
In the suburbs of Two Storm Wood, tree surgeons have mimicked nature with coronet cuts and natural fractures at the ends of standing monolith branches. “For fauna, fungi and other invertebrates, oaks are as valuable standing dead as alive and we try to keep them where possible. Deadwood is a key element of this and we leave wood where it lays.”
Estate rail fencing (decorative metal bars) surrounds Two Storm Wood (P1993) to stop deer stripping the trees. The wood was succession planted following the 1987 and 1990 storms, and the fencing may be removed once tree stems can withstand antler rubbing. Inside the plantation, post-and-rail fencing protects veteran tree roots from compaction, and children from playing in the hollow of a tree whose limbs could fail.
Returning over grassland, fresh-cut fencing encloses skylark ground-nest sites, and large signs encourage visitors to keep their dogs firmly on leads. An un-fenced P1990 oak has been formatively pruned – pollarded – to create this future veteran’s graceful spreading crown. “We are not a forestry concern converting trees into timber, but sometimes when a tree gets taken down, we will convert material with a mobile saw bench and use the planks to repair our deer crates (protective fencing around individual trees).”
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The paddock at the back of Holly Lodge prompts Paul to say that Richmond Park stables horses for riding, for therapy (helping people with well-being) and (shire horses) for pulling a grass-cutting gang mower or roller to weaken bracken to prevent it from encroaching on acid grassland.
In front of Holly Lodge, the cattle paddock is an experiment to see what ground flora might establish under a different style of grazing. Today, it is red and fallow deer “possibly spooked by the film crew setting up at the top of Sawyer’s Hill” that seek refuge in the brambles. “There are no natural predators and the site can only sustain herds of a certain size. Our wildlife officers maintain numbers at around 350 per herd.”
Staying 50 metres away, the deer are untroubled, but a combination of the shire horse mowing team walking up Sawyer’s Hill and a school group walking down proves too much and they bolt – in single file – across the road towards Saw Pit Plantation. Paul also takes his leave.
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Saw Pit Plantation is bisected by Queen’s Ride, a grass gallop used by royalty for exercising horses, leading up to White Lodge, a hunting lodge built for King George II. Landscape architect Humphrey Repton designed the views from White Lodge down across Pen Ponds. Still semi-wild and (mostly) free of park infrastructure, these views have been enjoyed by successive tenants including Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, the future King Edward VII, the future Queen Mary (wife of George VI) and now the Royal Ballet School.
From the open ground between Saw Pit Plantation and Queen Elizabeth’s Plantation, the bare broadleaf crowns edging Saw Pit Plantation form a background of fuzzy grey puffs. In the foreground, horses tread the meandering and recently resurfaced bridle path (also for pedestrian and estate vehicle use) and dog-owning ramblers head to the boggy edge of Leg-of-Mutton Pond, a sacrificial pond in which dogs can swim.
Small groups stroll cross-country towards Upper and Lower Pen Ponds. Avoiding puddles in paths that were once natural desire lines has seen some of these informal paths widening up to 15 metres in places. Some are being formalised, with improved surfaces and drainage (gullies and grips) to divert the water away, leaving the grass to fill in naturally. About a hectare’s worth of path-land is being returned to the landscape.
Pen Ponds, first excavated in 1746, are the largest of (currently) 30 water bodies. Several more ponds and scrapes are being added, to hold as much moisture in the park as possible. Slowing the flow of water into Beverley Brook helps alleviate flooding downstream in Barnes.
A resurfaced pedestrian causeway divides the ponds: the fawn-coloured surface provides a warm foil for a standing monolith bleaching a ghostly grey. A breeze ruffles pond-edge rushes. A plane heads west towards Heathrow. Duck heads dip and swan necks stretch in the shallows of a small man-made gravel beach. A bird island refuge eroded by wave action has been restored (reefs) with funds donated by players of the People’s Postcode Lottery. It is now home to waterfowl and roost sites for the common tern and black-headed gull. For a while, herons lived in the hawthorn scrub, before moving back to Pen Pond Plantation.
Following a trail less travelled through rough grass and marshland in the Mire, Pen Pond Plantation is fenced off, thick rhododendron having recently been cleared. Airy plantings and a shallow brackish watercourse point towards the Kiosk, where a coffee is accompanied by winter colour, courtesy of a lone Scots pine.
Aside from the Scots pine plantation at Ladderstile Gate, the park’s tree stock is 95-per-cent native broadleaf. For climate change, they are considering provenance, for example, sourcing Quercus robur grown from seed adapted to tolerate the dry conditions of Southern France or Spain.
During last summer’s drought, bowsers watered new plantings (up to three years old). Before that, February’s high winds toppled over parkland trees from the root plate. The park closed while each was assessed and made safe.
The police patrol car cruising the Kiosk area is a common sight in the Royal Parks; the e-scooterists enjoying the smooth tracks crossing this flat terrain, less so. A sign warns cyclists: ‘No riding off the paths’. If caught, culprits incur a £60 fine.
A sign is followed to Isabella Plantation, at the end of a tree line towards Tercentenary Plantation (mostly beech, P/E 1937), supporting a tipi frame of fallen branches. Children picnic beyond the bracken and (hopefully) beyond the reach of ticks.
Park oaks suffer acute oak decline, which is monitored by the teams. In 2009, six oak processionary moth nests were removed. By 2017, it was 970. The Royal Parks and Forest Research have monitored the affected sites since 2010. Last year, the number of nests found by volunteers fell, possibly because a natural predator, a fly, lays its eggs directly in the caterpillar.
Isabella Plantation, 17 ha, was planted with beech, oak and sweet chestnut for timber in 1831 and enclosed. In the 1940s, two thirds became an ornamental woodland garden where the public can see natives growing alongside exotics and the fringes planted with nectar- and berry-bearing trees, to provide wildlife with winter food and shelter.
An information board details four walking routes. At 16 minutes, Route B takes in the Bog Garden, Thomson’s Stream, Thomson’s Pond (one of three fed by water pumped from Pen Ponds and which, in 2013, had 2,500 tonnes of silt removed), and Beech Bay. With luck, there may be a great spotted woodpecker to see or a nuthatch song to hear.
Ducks dawdle on Peg’s Pond, and picnic blankets spread beneath the weeping willow. Alongside the manicured path, arboricultural interest comes from red-stemmed Tilia cordata; bamboo; stepping stones; an orange-needled, orange-stemmed, deciduous dawn redwood; the furry buds of Magnolia stellata and (helpfully tagged) Hamamelis vernalis squib branches bursting with small yellow flowers. Camellias, evergreen azaleas and rhododendron (50 species and 120 hybrids) will be blooming marvellous two or three months from now.
APRIL
On a sunny Good Friday, queues form beneath the pale pink and blood-red blooms of Camellia Walk. Bluebell Wood is roped off, protecting the ground for the next highly prized burst of photogenic purpley-blue. Heather blushes lilac above Main Stream’s yellow ‘lords and ladies’. The Plantations’ exit, accessorised with a fire hydrant repurposed as a donations box, is not far away. Towards White Ash Pond, Pond Slade and Ham Cross Plantation (P1829) – an open oak and horse chestnut woodland loosely enclosed with wide post-and-rail fences to deter visitors accessing the deer herd nursery area – uniform tufty-grassed tumuli, too big for molehills and too small to be homes for wombles relocating from neighbouring Wimbledon Common, are actually anthills and integral to acid grassland habitat.
Trails, the bridle path and cycle tracks meet Queen’s Road at Ham Cross. Just north on Kingston Slopes, the Queen’s Green Canopy has recently funded 70 standard tree plantings: oak, lime (streetwise), sweet chestnut and disease-resistant elm (new horizon), celebrating each year of Her (late) Majesty’s reign. The edge (1552/1567) is a double staggered native boundary hedge mix of several thousand whips, and may eventually be laid.
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Hornbeam Avenue leads towards Pembroke Lodge’s busy car park, café and visitor centre. The lodge’s four-hectare grounds are undergoing habitat and biodiversity improvement works: removal of sycamore, non-native cherry laurel, two non-native ‘trees of heaven’, and pollarding outgrown holly. By March, squirrels will have munched young hornbeam plantings. In April, a plaque detailing ‘the creation of Richmond Park by the monarchy and early years’ on the visitor centre’s exterior wall will be an interesting read.
Rejoining the Tamsin Trail as the sky turns yellow, back over King Henry’s Mound, passing Ian Dury’s bench, the Bug Hotel and Poet’s Corner to Richmond Gate, at sunset, a last view of the misty city is framed by bare broadleaf crowns glowing orange above the deadwood.
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