I’m a bit of a treehugger… visited Benmore gardens for the big trees at the weekend and the lady in the shop mentioned Kilmun, which I’d never even heard of. Popped down and it’s bloody awesome…
Maybe other tree fanciers will already know about it and what it is but, just in case, it’s a FC research place where since the 30s they’ve planted out blocks of different species just to see what’d happen- what would make a cash crop, what’d die off, what’d do something interesting.
And it’s all on FC scale so they didn’t plant, say, a couple of giant redwoods like you get in a normal arboretum- they planted a field of em, and a field of coasts next door, and so on- blocks of hundreds of trees just doing their thing, that you usually consider to be an interesting specimen in a garden. There’s some paths and maps but it’s run halfway to abandoned and all run on timescales of decades so there’s spots where a species failed or struggled, there’s natives growing all over the place, half-invisible paths to scramble around on… Instantly one of my favourite places
So… I like botanical gardens and ordered arboretums and the like, but is there anywhere else like this, with the sheer scale and less of a garden? I know about Lael up north but that’s the only place I’ve found with googlage. It’s obviously not wild but it’s like the difference between seeing an animal in a cage and in a big enclosure, I suppose. Free range trees.