Long Grove

The end of last month saw a rare return to the Long Grove Park clockwise, last visited in April, as noticed at reference 1. While reference 2 should dispel any lingering confusion about its name.

What I believe to be Wellingtonia No.12, very near the small roundabout at the junction between Chertsey Lane and Queen Alexandra's Way. Need to go back to confirm the presence of the small monkey puzzle and the former hospital administration block. The former behind the Wellingtonia, the latter behind the camera.

According to references 4 and 5, Chertsey Abbey did once own land in Epsom, perhaps the whole of what was then Epsom, so maybe the lane was named by some heritage trusty.

I think I need to take advice on the actual Domesday text.

Carrying on round. The management teams at these mental hospitals look to have really tried to make the grounds green and pleasant - although the trees would have been much younger, say fifty years ago, when they started closing these places down.

That said, I felt on the day, foolishly perhaps, that there was something slightly odd about building a housing estate in a park. We did not have the trees and the space on the Chase Estate, but at least it was a straightforward housing estate, not pretending to be anything other than a suburb of London.

Getting near the enclosure of the park proper.

I have now reached the enclosure, from where you look down across a good stetch of country before you get to the horizon. All very green from this angle. But what was the mast on that horizon?

With the help of Ordnance Survey and Gemini, I decide today that it must be the Crystal Palace transmitting tower, roughly 12 miles north east, roughly 200m of it sitting 100m above sea level, one of the highest things in the London area. Maybe one day I will find out how to strip all the roads and buildings out of the Ordnance Survey offering - which would be useful for various purposes.

The orange spots mark the spots.

A sit on a bench in the sun, then a spot of botanical. Google Images suggests purple knapweed, aka Centaurea scabiosa, to be found at reference 6. Which looks fair enough, with the outer ring getting a mention, but I must try and find some leaves which would confirm the identification.

In the meantime, this botanical drawing turned up by Bing shows the right kind of stalks to the flowers.

More botany, just before I get to the Horton Hill exit.

Another small tree with not quite opposite leaves and with prominent buds in most of the axils.

What I get to after a bit of chit-chat with Google Image's AI assistant, Google and Wikipedia. Olives ruled out along the way on the grounds that olives are never yellow, just green, black or something in-between. So willow-leaved sea buckthorn, aka Hippophae salicifolia. But there is some doubt about this in my mind regarding the colour of the berries and the speckling of the leaves visible under zoom.

A relic of one of the mental hospital botanists?

PS: raking the acorns off our back lawn yesterday and the reference to pigs in the woods above, combined to remind me to ask Gemini what pigs do about the crunchy shells of acorns and the bristly husks of beech nuts, both once porcine staples. Gemini is quite clear that the pigs have mouths which are clever enough to crunch the things up, spit out the shells or husks and to swallow the kernels. Furthermore, their saliva contains something to neutralise the otherwise toxic amounts of tannin in those shells and husks. In which they do better than cows, horses, ponies, sheep and goats, apt to make themselves ill - often fatally - by trying to eat such stuff. A good story, but I will try and check it in the morning. In the meantime, Bing turns up the advertisement infested reference 8.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/chicken-dinner.html.

Reference 2: https://www.epsom-ewell.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/business/Rangers/Long%20Grove%20Park%20Accessibility%20version.pdf.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/wellingtonia-12.html.

Reference 4: https://chertseymuseum.org/Chertsey_Abbey.

Reference 5: https://opendomesday.org/place/TQ2161/epsom/.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurea_scabiosa.

Reference 7: https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/330956/hippophae-salicifolia-streetwise/details.

Reference 8: https://animalofthings.com/animals-that-eat-acorns/.

Group search keys: 20250930, acornsk.