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Pterocarya x rehderana

Nobody looking at this tree can believe it was planted a mere 35 years ago. The late Alan Mitchell, our greatest tree-connoisseur, called it ‘the fastest thing on roots’. The wingnut is a prodigy, throwing heavy limbs into the sky as fast as a willow spreads its wispy branches, and festooning them, all summer long, with foot-long catkins developing into necklaces of nuts. At 35 its trunk is deeply corrugated and senior-looking; a good three metres round and 20 high.

P. x rehderana is a hybrid between the Caucasian wingnut, P. fraxinifolia, and a Chinese species. It grows faster than either, with one serious drawback. Like its parent from the Caucasus it is given to suckering. Left alone its shallow roots will throw up a forest of suckers. A huge plant in the Cambridge Botanic Garden can hardly be called a tree at all: thicket is a better word. Here at Saling I grow it in grass and cut thick green sucker-shoots almost every week. Taken as cuttings in July they soon root: this tree is lusty in every regard. The tree on the left in the photograph is a swamp cypress, Taxodium distichum. The soil here, however, is gravel; this is not a damp spot.

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