Nov/Dec 2025: The ABC of autumn
- hhtreewatch
- 6 hours ago
- 18 min read
It's the end of November, and as we pass from autumn into winter most of our trees have shed their leaves and look a bit sorry for themselves. But if you peek beyond the bare branches and the leaden skies you'll still find patches of colour and variety and unmistakable signs that spring is just around the corner. Just two months to go before we start seeing blossom again!
We've spent a few days walking around the neighbourhood in the past month, taking pictures of interesting trees in every one of the 23 streets we cover, from Ardbeg to Wyneham. But this time, instead of lugging round a full-size SLR camera with interchangeable lenses in the cold and wet, we used a very ordinary, rather old mobile phone. You can't get close to the canopy without a telephoto zoom, so instead you have to be creative with the features that are closer to the ground.
Surprisingly most of the pictures worked out pretty well, so this is something that you can definitely do for yourselves. In most cases night-time shots and extreme close-ups actually turned out better than with an SLR, although in the photo of the pollarded plane on Beckwith Road the houses look as if they're about to tip over, thanks to the mobile's wide-angle lens.
A-B Ardbeg Road to Beckwith Road
Ardbeg is one of our shortest streets, and apart from one solitary Himalayan birch (Betula utilis jacquemontii) at the Half Moon Lane end it's wall-to-wall London planes (Platanus x hispanica). Herne Hill Tree Watch did its first ever pruning session here in March 2020, just a couple of days before lockdown, tackling the enormous basal growths on the plane trees. But we can only reach so high with our loppers and saws, so any sprouting burrs higher up the trunk have to wait until the council crews arrive. The tree pictured below left, at the Red Post Hill end of Ardbeg, is typical.
Once the leaves have dropped, you can see the bare bones of our 160 planes, like the skeleton of the pollarded tree pictured outside 7 Beckwith. Every time a tree gets pollarded (where the topmost branches are sawn off at the same place each year) it senses that it's under attack and develops more spiky growths down at pavement level in response to the injury. The big planes on Sunray Avenue have hardly been touched and we never need to prune them. On Half Moon Lane, though, where they get an annual pollarding to make sure the 37 bus can get through, the 'epicormic' growths at the base come back with a vengeance.
B Beckwith Road to Burbage Road
Beckwith is traditionally a treescape of big planes interspersed with big birches. Out of its current 37 trees, 19 are planes, 10 are birches (mostly old silver birches) and eight are other species: two American sweet gums and one each of hibiscus, holm oak, Turkish hazel, ginkgo, tulip tree and cherry. There are also three empty pits waiting to be filled (at nos. 19, 28 and 44-46). The leaf shown below left looks like it might almost be from an oak, with its deeply cut lobes, but it's actually a Swedish birch (Betula pendula 'Crispa') at 63-65 Beckwith, one of a pair planted three years ago. The other is over the road at no. 68. The small feathery leaves are unique among birches, the stem grows tall and straight and the branches weep like a silver birch. It will be interesting to watch them develop.
The second picture is of course an unmistakable ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) outside 47 Burbage, one of the biggest ginkgos along the odd side of the road. It was taken at night about a month ago, lit by a streetlight when the brilliant yellow leaves were still intact. By the end of November about a quarter of the canopy was still clinging on.
B-C Burbage Road to Carver Road
Almost opposite the Burbage ginkgo, between nos. 48 and 50, stands a special sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua). What makes it special? It's one of the very few liquidambars in Herne Hill that isn't a cultivar. In other words, it hasn't been propagated or cloned by a nursery to emphasise a particular characteristic like leaf colour. It's what's known as the 'species tree', growing just as it would in its native habitat of the southeastern United States. How can we tell? The corky bark of the species tree is the giveaway. Look at the craggy surface of the trunk and the knobbly limbs in the left-hand picture below, with their striking 'wings' on the upper surfaces. None of the cultivars has this feature.
Over on Carver there's another tree that's worth a look for its fascinating, almost reptilian bark. It's a Red Cappadocian maple (Acer cappadocicum 'Rubrum') opposite no. 38, dating from March 2024. The bark looks almost the same as trees from a group known as snakebark maples, mostly from Japan and China. They also have colourful vertical stripes, but they have clear botanical differences from the Cappadocian in the buds and flower heads. There's an identical tree, planted at the same time, alongside the fence between 1 Carver and Half Moon Lane. and a species tree - plain Acer cappadocicum - from two years earlier outside 36A.
C Casino Avenue
We're in more familiar territory on Casino Avenue, where we've written many times about the magnolias. Below left is a big furry flower bud from a Northern Japanese magnolia (Magnolia kobus) outside no. 116. There are 11 of this early-flowering species on the street, out of a total of 27 magnolias. Bluebell Arboretum and Nursery in Derbyshire has a pretty picture of kobus flowers on its website, but the tree is better known to us for its extraordinary fruit.
Over the road, on the grass verge outside no. 47 at the corner of the top cul-de-sac, is a fine old crab apple, Malus x floribunda, the Japanese crab. It's been a good year for many fruit trees in Herne Hill, and this pleasing little tree seems reluctant to part with its own colourful apples even as winter approaches. By April or May it will be covered in beautiful pink flower buds and white blossom like this one on the RHS website.
D Danecroft Road
Two more late-fruiting trees now on Danecroft. On the left, the sweet little common holly (Ilex aquifolium) planted outside no. 27 in March last year, seems to be thriving in its new environment despite being a tree of native woodlands.
And on the right, at the bottom of the hill, the fruit of the bastard service tree (Sorbus x thuringiaca 'Fastigiata'), one of three that arrived on the street exactly three years ago.
Why 'bastard' though? The tree originated as a naturally occurring hybrid between two native species in the Sorbus family, the rowan or mountain ash (Sorbus aucuparia) and the whitebeam (Sorbus aria). Sorbus are known to hybridise spontaneously in the wild and this one was eventually commercialised.
Perhaps the plant hunter who discovered it and bestowed its common name disapproved of this unseemly behaviour between cousins. Their offspring have interesting leaves as a result: lobed like a whitebeam but then 'pinnate' like a rowan at the stalk, meaning they break up into little symmetrical 'leaflets'. A little picture (right) explains it more easily.
D-E Delawyk Crescent to Elfindale Road
The Delawyk estate is full of interesting trees, including three big old common horse chestnuts (Aesculus hippocastanum). A fourth was lost from the front lawn six or seven years ago. They're glorious in full bloom in April and May, but even now the plump, sticky, mahogany-coloured leaf buds are signalling that spring is not that far off. Horse chestnuts are among the first large trees to come into leaf and the first to drop their leaves too. You'll find the tree where we spotted these buds (below left) if you walk down the entrance road to the estate opposite Ruskin Walk. It's by the side of the first garage you come to.
Meanwhile, the seven Kanzan cherry trees (Prunus 'Kanzan') on Elfindale have lost the leaves from their crowns, but this one (below right) at nos. 88-90 was still growing from root suckers at the base at the end of November. Kanzans are grafted on to wild cherry (Prunus avium) rootstock, and that's what's coming through from under the ground. The leaf fall allows you to clearly see the characteristic vase-like form of the Kanzans, which will be smothered in pink flowers come springtime.
E Elfindale Road to Elmwood Road
The many chanticleer pear trees (Pyrus calleryana 'Chanticleer') in Herne Hill are in some ways the opposite of the horse chestnuts: their leaves emerge very early in the year and they stay until very late in the year, when the unremarkable reds and browns of early autumn turn to russet, like this one outside 87 Elfindale, where the road turns before meeting Elmwood.
Just at that corner, outside 30 Elmwood, there's another tree that hung on to its foliage for an unseasonably long time: a hybrid cherry (Prunus x schmittii) created from a wild cherry and a greyleaf cherry (Prunus canescens). The gleaming bark that resulted is remarkable and brings to mind the even shinier Tibetan cherry (Prunus serrula tibetica). One of the Tibetans, an exact replacement for a previous loss, is now growing well on the Delawyk estate, on the lawn between houses 44 and 54A. Another was planted at 16-18 Stradella Road in March 2025.
F Frankfurt Road
There are a couple of chanticleer pears round the corner on Frankurt that are worth a look for their unusual spiral bark: the one pictured below at 31, and another three doors away at 37. Why they grow like this - while other pears of the same species don't - is a bit of a mystery. Mature sweet chestnuts (Castanea sativa) routinely spiral once they reach about 60 years of age.
Elsewhere on Frankfurt, further up the hill at 7-9, we found these amazing wrinkly samaras - seed pods designed to catch the wind and spin to the ground - on a young Amur maple (Acer ginnala) planted in April 2024. An earlier Amur maple at the bottom of Frankfurt was decapitated a few months after its arrival in January 2023 but is still growing vigorously from the short remaining stem. We're trying to nurse it back into a normal tree shape by creating a new central leader from one of the near-vertical shoots, but unfortunately someone has been repeatedly pruning it back so it now looks more like a bush
H Half Moon Lane
In Herne Hill, it's fair to say that all roads lead to London planes. But there are so many of them and they're so full of character that we're happy to give them space in this blog. The one on the left, below, is at 44 Half Moon Lane and it shows something you'll only see when it's been raining heavily: green mosses and lichen at the base of the trunk, like a damp dry stone wall in the countryside. Further along the road, opposite the new house at 92, you can clearly see the difference between the shaded north side of the plane's trunk and the bleached south side, facing the sun. The contrast is most obvious in autumn, when the leaves have fallen, and it's so strong that you could almost navigate using plane bark as your compass.
Still on Half Moon Lane, the broad-leaved cockspur thorn (Crataegus x prunifolia) at 35-37 has just produced its best-ever harvest of crimson fruit, known as haws. This is one of the most attractive street trees in our area and is reliably interesting all year round. In winter you can see long curved thorns among its neat and symmetrical branches. In spring it produces abundant white blossom. In summer the leaves shine glossy and green. And in autumn the haws gleam on a background of yellow and brown.
Over at no.133, between Ken's Fish Bar and Magnum House, stands a large sweet gum that's kept it's green five-fingered ('palmate') leaves right through to the beginning of December. There's another big one like this outside Oliver Burn estate agents. We can't tell you their exact scientific name, other than the generic Liquidambar styraciflua, because, unless you're a botanist, most sweet gums are hard to tell apart. If you're going by leaf shape alone that won't be much use: the foliage can vary from twig to twig. In this picture the autumn colours are subdued compared to the sweet gum's fiery reputation, but if we're lucky, very soon they could be as dramatic as in this photo of the same tree exactly four years ago.
H Herne Hill
The grounds of the Denesmead flats, next to St Paul's church, have a lot of trees worth a quick visit, but the most numerous are the holm oaks (Quercus ilex). The biggest of these is right behind the bus stop outside the flats. It's a huge, five-stemmed tree and it's not popular with some of the bus passengers who wait there. There are too many careless birds in the branches above their heads. Being evergreen and decked with ivy, the big tree is also rather dark and gloomy, but if you walk a short way along the entrance road you come to a lovely little stand of five young holm oaks on the left. It's charming in any season, but in spring there will be yellow catkins and in summer acorns.
H Herne Hill to Hollingbourne Road
Another London plane (below left), this time on Herne Hill, showing one of the trees on the Southwark (odd-numbered) side with a full head of leaves in late November. On the Lambeth side most of the planes are already bare. The reason isn't really obvious. It could be something to do with the prevailing wind, but this comes from the south-west and Herne Hill is aligned south-west/north-east, so the wind should hit both sides of the road equally. Maybe it's because there are simply more planes on the Southwark side and each tree acts as a windbreak for its neighbour.
The picture on the right is another hawthorn we've photographed before at this time of year. It's the Crataegus x lavallei, or hybrid cockspur thorn. It differs from the broad-leaved species above in its much denser canopy of long, glossy leaves that stay on the tree until the end of the year; its vase-like form; and its bigger haws. Both cockspur thorns get their name from the shape of their sharp thorns, curved like the spur on a rooster's leg that he uses to fight his rivals.
The hybrid thorn's fruits are normally orange but in 2025 they've somehow turned out red. The same thing happened to the bastard service tree berries we showed earlier: usually orange, now pinky red. Have a look at this photo from two years ago showing the Hollingbourne lavallei and the Danecroft thuringiaca side by side, both with orange fruit. Very odd.
H Holmdene Avenue
The extra width of Holmdene Avenue means it's suitable for bigger trees than most, of our residential streets and the planting record of the last five years lists new limes, liquidambars, a whitebeam, a ginkgo and a honey locust. But the most frequent arrival has been the Japanese pagoda tree, now classified as Styphnolobium japonicum. You might know it by its earlier botanical name, Sophora japonica. There are now 10 of these on Holmdene, while Danecroft has a pair at neighbouring houses and there's a single pagoda tree on Carver.
Mature pagoda trees are easily recognised by their spherical crowns of bright green pinnate leaves that flutter in a breeze. On younger trees, like the one at 74-76 Holmdene (below right), when the autumn leaves have fallen you can see the clear distinction between old, pale brown growth and the dark green of newer branches. They grow fast: the tree pictured on the left, by the brick side wall of what's now West 16th cafe, and the equally flourishing pagoda tree at the corner of Carver and Herne Hill were both only planted in 2021. They can can eventually reach a height of 25 metres and the RHS says they tolerate poor soils, drought and pollution. If you add to that the cooling and shading effect of their broad canopy they become ideal climate-safe trees for cities .
H-N Howletts Road to Nairne Grove
The unique four-lobed leaves of the tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) are amazing at any time of year, but in autumn they turn a bright, buttery shade of yellow. We're lucky to have four of these great trees in Herne Hill: the big one with the leaves pictured here on Howletts; other big specimens on Hollingbourne and Burbage; and a juvenile on Stradella. Look out for their scattered flowers in June, their primitive-looking fruit in late summer and the woody skeletons of the fruit in winter.
We're also privileged to have four very special sycamores on Nairne Grove, the miniature mop-headed cultivar Acer pseudoplatanus 'Brilliantissimum. Its salmon pink leaves have long since blown away but in its twilight silhouette (below) you can see the bud arrangement that's shared by all acers (maples): opposite buds. That means that buds, leaves and twigs (except the bud at the end of the twig, known as the terminal bud) grow in pairs, with one directly opposite the other on the stem. Ash trees have this same pattern. Most other trees have alternate buds, which climb the stem one at a time.
R Red Post Hill to Ruskin Walk
The little fastigiate (upright) oak on Red Post Hill, planted exactly three years ago at the side of 112 Casino, is doing very well and is now showing off its nice coat of autumn colours which should stay on the tree until spring. There's another of these Quercus robur fastigiata 'Koster' (a cultivar of English oak) at the corner of Elmwood Road and Half Moon Lane, dating back to April 2020, but it's struggled rather more than the Red Post Hill tree. We suspect the soil at the Elmwood location is poor. A spectacular pocket handkerchief tree (Davidia involucrata) that occupied the same site died after a year or so, rubbish sometimes gets dumped there and dogs use it as a toilet.
The many birches all over Herne Hill have had a good autumn, keeping their pretty yellow leaves through November. Among the best-looking is the old silver birch at no.74, still big, beautiful and healthy in its old age. It's avoided the infirmities of some of our mature silver birches, the tangles with telephone wires and the drastic pollarding.
R-S Ruskin Walk to Stradella Road
One oustanding feature of Ruskin Walk's street trees that we've often spoken about is the three rare Grignon's thorns (Crataegus x grignonensis). They routinely carry their haws well into spring, when they provide a cheerful backdrop to the plentiful white blossom. However they had a hard time in this year's drought, with very sparse leaf cover, and we thought we might even lose one. When the rains came they rebounded well, with new leaf and fruit, although the tree at 79 still isn't fully recovered. We'll also keep an eye on the Grignon's at 29-31, but the one at no. 40 is looking great, with haws right down to the trunk (below left). If we do eventually lose one or more of these rarities we'll do our best to make sure they're replaced like-for-like.
On the right we have a splendid red leaf from the trident maple (Acer buergerianum) at 48 Stradella. Earlier in autumn, when there are still touches of green, the three-lobed leaves (hence the 'trident') look even more impressive. There's now another of these excellent trees in Herne Hill, planted at 69 Frankfurt in February 2024.
S Stradella Road
Stradella has a wide range of trees, although the Yoshino cherries (Prunus x yedoensis) on the odd-numbered side of the street are now also making inroads into the even side, with two filling gaps there earlier this year. Among the more settled inhabitants, the liquidambar at no. 8 was a pretty sight in November, but around the corner, where Stradella meets Burbage, the Indian horse chestnut (Aesculus indica) stole the autumn show with its traffic-light yellow leaves. The smooth brown nuts it bears are still visible too if you peer up into the branches.
Stradella's older residents also have interesting bark. The nine huge silver maples (Acer saccharinum) develop big spooky-looking burrs when the heroic street volunteers do their annual pruning of the basal growths. The photo below left shows one of the warty outbreaks on the silver maple opposite no. 1, one of three on the stretch of Stradella that meets Half Moon Lane. There are another six beyond the turn towards Burbage.
Another Stradella veteran provides the adjoining photo: one of the four formidable Kanzan cherries (Prunus 'Kanzan') at the Burbage end of the street that still produce fantastic pink blossom every April. This individual, at no. 97, is speckled with a yellow lichen on the trunk. It used to be said that lichens were a sign of clean air, but it seems that opinions have now changed. The few tree lichens that survive in the city are actually the ones that can resist the polluted atmosphere.
S-W Sunray Avenue to Warmington Road
Over at Sunray Avenue, at the far end of the big green space that stretches all the way back from the pedestrian crossing, stands a pair of common hazels. Their male catkins are another harbinger of spring. They start off short and pale green, like the bunch in the photo below, taken outside no. 61, with each of those darker dots concealing a little male flower. The catkins will lengthen and turn yellow, hanging around until they finally release their pollen in early spring. The female flowers, which will develop into hazelnuts, are tiny and cling to the stem like little red-tipped buds.
Warmington Road hasn't yet got a magnolia tree of its own, but there's a big, vigorous, evergreen Southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) in a Holmdene garden that overlooks no. 27. This autumn it provided residents with a bonus: the extraordinary, primeval fruit of this species. The photo shows orange-red magnolia seeds poking out of the husk, called a follicetum. We've previously written about an identical, although smaller, tree on the lawn of the Pynnersmead flats on Herne Hill, and the similar lifecycle of the kobus magnolias of Casino Avenue, but it's a pleasure to see the same primitive processes going on in another part of the neighbourhood.
W Winterbrook Road to Wyneham Road
Pleached lime hedges are an attractive feature of Victorian and Edwardian Herne Hill, particularly in Winterbrook and Stradella. The one shown below, at 11 Winterbrook, is a very fine example of an arched hedge that's been beautifully maintained. It's especially lovely when the leaves change into their autumn yellow. There's another exceptional hedge at the Half Moon Lane end of Stradella, facing Pedder estate agents, and you can see traces of them on the lower slopes of Herne Hill and also in the three stumpy lime trees behind the picket fence at the front of the Delawyk estate. In fact wherever you see one or more pillar-like limes in a front garden they will be the vestiges of an old pleached hedge.
Limes (Tilia) were the preferred trees for pleaching across England but hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) and beech (Fagus sylvatica) - which retain many of their leaves over winter - were also favoured.
To make a pleached lime hedge from scratch you place wooden posts in the ground about 2.5 metres apart and connect them at around head height with one, two or three wires or wooden battens. Then you plant a strong three- or four-year old tree with a good leader, or central stem, at the foot of each post, snipping off any side shoots. Once the little tree has reached the desired height you tie the top twigs into the horizontal framework and let them grow until they meet the twigs from the next post along. Keep snipping away at any other lateral growths and within about 15 years you'll have the makings of a nice pleached hedge. Once the original limbs are too thick to weave together you'll have to prune the burr that will develop at the top of the stem to encourage fresh, soft shoots that are more pliable. It's a labour of love.
Have a look at the long column of closely packed limes between the doctor's surgery at 2 Burbage and the junction with Half Moon Lane. This too would originally have been a pleached hedge. You can make out the point, two or three metres above the ground, where the stem was lopped to stop it growing any higher. Above that junction the powerful branches that sprouted when the hedge was abandoned are smooth, compared to the rugged bark below.
And now for something completely different: a redspire pear (Pyrus calleryana 'Redspire'), one of two on the even-numbered side of Wyneham Road as it approaches Beckwith. There's another couple of these unusual pears on Stradella, outside nos. 4 and 6. They're closely related to another Pyrus calleryana, the chanticleer cultivar that we see all over Herne Hill. But compared to the narrow and rather tangled chanticleers, the redspires are broad and neatly upswept, with dark, dense foliage that remains on the tree until late in the year. The redspire in the photo (below right), alongside the garden wall of 39B Beckwith, had barely started changing colour at the end of November, but the thinning canopy did reveal clusters of tiny brown spherical fruits. These miniature pears are usually well hidden in the redspire and chanticleer branches, but this year all tree fruit crops, including these, seem to have been abundant. Hungry birds will be happy.
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