April 2025: What street tree is that?

Tree watching is in some ways like any collector's hobby: birdwatching, trainspotting, stamp collecting or even recipe hoarding. The more you do it, the more you find out and the more you appreciate the diversity out there. The difference perhaps is that you don't need to go far or spend anything to get started. Just look out of your front window at the trees along your street.

You might ask: What are they called? What do their names mean? Why do some have fantastic autumn colours and others virtually none? Why do some bloom early in the year and others only flower in late spring or summer? Why are there so many birds in one tree and not a single one in its neighbour? How big is the tree outside my house going to get? And how can I help look after it?

Simply naming the trees is the first step towards building up a wealth of knowledge that can eventually take in arboriculture, botany, horticulture, meteorology, timber science, exploration, microbiology, entomology, colonial history and many other fields.

And we can help you with step number one. We've spent the past few months updating, expanding and publishing our records of every single street tree in the Southwark half of Herne Hill. You'll find them by clicking on the MAPS tab at the top of every page of our website and selecting STREET GUIDES. Or to get you started right now, just follow this link.

You'll see a grid of 24 green blocks, each with the name of a road. Click on any of them and you'll get a chart like this:

Sample street guide. This one is for Wyneham Road

Each guide is set up as a walk from one end of the street to the other, one side (odd or even) at a time. So in the case of Wyneham Road (shown above) it takes the junction with Beckwith Road as the starting point and finishes at Elmwood Road. It gives you the nearest house number (or two numbers if the tree is between adjoining properties); the common name of the tree; and the name in botanical Latin. Common names can vary between regions, countries and periods of history, but the Latin names are standardised across the world.

There are a few caveats we ought to tell you about:

• You can only use these street guides on a desktop computer, a laptop or a tablet. With the technology we have at hand it's impossible for us to display all this data on the little screen of a mobile phone. That means that if you're setting off on a tree walk you'll need to print off the relevant pages and take the printouts with you.

• Our data isn't foolproof. We'll try to keep up with changes (old trees being felled and new trees being planted) and we might need to amend a species, for example, if our identification turns out to be wrong. But if you spot an error please let us know.

• On Herne Hill itself we've only included trees on the Southwark (odd-numbered) side. The opposite side is is still SE24, but in Lambeth.

• We've listed a short stretch of Denmark Hill, between Red Post Hill and Sunray Avenue, even though it's officially in SE5 (Camberwell).

• We haven't yet included most of the housing estates in Herne Hill. It's very difficult to describe the locations of trees when they're scattered about on big lawns, and sketch maps make much more sense. We've already created one for the Delawyk estate, which we wrote about here.

• This year we hope to bring you further simple tree maps covering Pynnersmead and Denesmead (on Herne Hill); Hillcrest (Sunray Avenue); Carterscroft and Cassinghurst (between Sunray Avenue and Red Post Hill); and the Elmwood Road estate.

• The same goes for the three open spaces in the Sunray estate conservation area. We'll draw up maps for the big grassy meadow opposite the junction of Sunray Avenue and Casino Avenue; the small square further down Sunray, towards St Faith's church; and the other square outside the Casino flats.

Which street is the most densely planted?

The answer may surprise you. Here's how we worked it out.

In the dark green banner above every chart you'll see the number of trees on that street and the number of houses. We've limited our count to individual houses, but left out blocks of flats, houses used wholly as businesses and shops with flats above. If you divide the figure for houses by the number of trees you'll come up with a simple illustration of the tree density for that particular road.

We've done the calculation for each street and come up with the results below. The street at the top has the highest planting density, and the one at the bottom the lowest.

Street name	Total number of houses	Total number of trees	Ratio of houses per tree
Howletts Road	3	4	0.8
Stradella Road	79	78	1.0
Half Moon Lane	73	70	1.0
Winterbrook Road	59	53	1.1
Burbage Road	89	74	1.2
Nairne Grove	24	19	1.3
Sunray Avenue	86	64	1.3
Carver Road	48	35	1.4
Beckwith Road	60	37	1.6
Ruskin Walk	76	45	1.7
Casino Avenue	130	73	1.8
Herne Hill (odd side)	45	25	1.8
Elmwood Road	59	32	1.8
Wyneham Road	21	11	1.9
Elfindale Road	96	49	2.0
Ardbeg Road	28	14	2.0
Denmark Hill (odd side)	6	3	2.0
Hollingbourne Road	63	31	2.0
Danecroft Road	79	38	2.1
Red Post Hill	89	41	2.2
Frankfurt Road	84	37	2.3
Holmdene Avenue	102	43	2.4
Warmington Road	26	5	5.2
23 streets	1425	881	1.6

Howletts is the winner by a fraction but that's a very misleading result: there are only four trees on the street and three houses, plus a side entrance to flats along Half Moon Lane. One side of Howletts has no trees at all.

The next four positions - leafy Stradella Road, Half Moon Lane, Winterbrook Road and Burbage Road - more accurately reflect the dense planting there over the years. At the bottom, Danecroft Road, Frankfurt Road and Holmdene Avenue could all do with a boost, while Red Post Hill lacks any obvious space to plant more trees. Last place goes to Warmington Road, the most barren-looking street in the whole neighbourhood.

The overall tally for Herne Hill is 881 street trees, spread out among 1,425 houses - in other words, one tree for every 1.6 houses. We're proud to say a quarter of the total have been planted since we started work in 2020. Roughly two street trees for every three houses is a very decent number and a testimony to the strength of Herne Hill Tree Watch, our campaigning over the last five years and our volunteers' determination to keep all those trees in good shape.