To commemorate the critical and sales success of London’s Street Trees, Safe Haven’s Publisher, Graham Coster, decided to increase the already remarkable diversity of trees on the capital’s streets by contributing yet one more exotic species: a lemon tree. In consultation with the then chief arboricultural officer of Hackney Council, Rupert Bentley Walls, whose tree-planting initiative had seen the borough transformed into an amazing urban arboretum, a suitable specimen was duly purchased. And then the Covid pandemic intervened. Over two years went by with the lemon tree never leaving Italy. Belatedly, however, it has made it to the UK, and an ideally sheltered, south-facing, pedestrianised street in Shoreditch. Its planting was toasted by the participants with limoncello.
Safe Haven and Hackney Council plant the first lemon tree in a London street
Among the planting party, Marcello of the Tree Musketeers is far left, next to him Hackney assistant tree officer Raffe Ross-Pearce, far right former Hackney councillor Vincent Stops, who over 20 years championed the borough’s street planting programme, in the foreground Hackney tree officer Marc Sanders, and behind him London’s Street Trees author Paul Wood.