Yesterday I went in search of one more extremely old tree.
And this time I headed to Southgate (in Enfield).
The Minchenden Oak(800? years old)
Middlesex was once awash with country seats and one of these was Minchenden House, just along the ridge from Arnos Grove. It was built in the 1660s and passed through a succession of gentry before one particular daughter married above herself becoming the Duchess of Chandos. The house had a classical pillared dome, a premier location on The Green and was said to have one window for every week of the year. The estate was sold off in 1853 to the neighbouring brewing tycoon in an attempt to stall the advance of suburban housing, a fate which befell his amalgamated 300 acres in 1928, and today the Arnos Grove estate smothers the slopes above the Pymmes Brook. Minchenden House may have been demolished but locals campaigned to save the enormous medieval oak round the back of the parish church so that's still here, and huge, and tad on the secret side.
To find the Minchenden Oak look for the brick archway down Waterfall Road, inconveniently labelled Minchenden Oak Garden on a small copper plaque. What lies beyond is a small space barely 30m wide with lawn and shrubbery, also paved paths that don't quite go anywhere and on the far side a whopping ancient oak tree. It has a gnarled bulbous trunk like some great cloven leg, and a fairly scraggly top with several thick upright branches that end with an abrupt cut. It's hard to reach a ripe old age with all your bits intact, thus the Minchenden Oak has been fighting a long battle against nature and gravity. Two limbs succumbed to a storm in 1899, others later needed propping up, then in 2013 considerable decay was discovered within the timber and fifteen tonnes of wood had to be lopped off to protect the central trunk. It's hard to square the current tree with the 1873 claim that it had the largest canopy of any tree in England (38m across and 'still growing') but still an impressive sight.
"Its boughs bending to the earth, with almost artificial regularity of form and equidistance from each other, give it the appearance of a gigantic tent; with verdant draperies, drawn up to admit the refreshing breezes that curl the myriads of leaves which form altogether a mass of vegetable beauty and grandeur, scarcely to be equalled by any other production of the same nature in the kingdom. It is a magnificent living canopy, impervious to the day." (Sylva Britannica, 1826)
The Minchenden Oak Garden was officially opened on 12th May 1934 in a ceremony involving the local choir and various borough dignitaries, including two hymns and the singing of Psalm 23. The garden screams 1930s with its rustic stone pillars and low decorative walls, as if a magnificent tree wasn't sufficient in itself, and has a small sunken terrace at one end with a broken pedestal in the centre. In a lovely touch the benches around the garden are made from wood removed from the tree in 2013, these replacing a seat that once circled the great trunk because nobody's allowed that close any more. Even the surround of the main information board comes from the old oak, ditto an arty selection of sliced stumps where a small group of children might sit.
The Minchenden Oak is a warning that great old trees don't always survive, and a triumph in that much of it somehow has. But how much better to have seen it at its zenith in the 19th century, long before suburbia turned up, a tree that was already ancient when the first rich man built a house here.
