The Wellingtonia of Kew gardens were not particularly impressive, at least not the ones that I found, and I decided that a score of two for the day would be appropriate, with this one being found close by the lily pond - which last seemed to be of much greater interest to most of the passers by. There seemed to be rather more coastal redwoods, some very large, on which further report in due course
The lily pond on the map provided by Kew: not a terribly good map to my mind. The commercial artist who put it together was not in the first division. 'S' marks the pond.
North to the right, a slightly confusing arrangement, the result of the gardens being longer north to south than they are east to west. The portrait garden is rotated to fit on a landscape page.
The gmaps version, with north in the right place. The tree in question might be to the immediate right of the orange spot, on Redwood Grove rather than the rather more open Cedar Vista. Lots of trees.
On the ground, I completely missed the complex above and slightly to the right - the arboretum nursery. One wonders how long it will last as a nursery: at Wisley a lot of such spaces have been turned over to day visitor facilities of one sort or another.
Not quite in the middle. Today, it seems rather improbable that any of the Kew trees will reach this average size. Some of them are maybe 150 years old, so where will they be in a thousand years time? Never mind two thousand.
Maybe natural selection and evolution had a point when they arranged things so that most trees have a much shorter life span.
PS 1: probably the ticket of the tree by the lily pond.
PS 2: Bing's best effort on the catalogue number top left on the ticket (1969-13710). An Italian restaurant on a retail park in Fuveau, a town near Marseilles in the south of France. Quite handy to a large McDonald's, although I have failed to find a picture of the Italian exterior. Street View fails for once.
Snapped from their menu, to be found at reference 2. The restaurant looks entirely respectable, probably on the tier above, for example, ASK at Epsom. A place which we used to visit reasonably regularly but which we have not visited for some time - probably years - now.
While Gemini's opening gambit, with the clue that this was a tree at Kew, was 'The Kew accession number 1969-13710 identifies a specimen of Miconia calvescens DC., based on Kew's botanical databases...'. It turned out that while he appeared to have access to the herbarium database, mostly dried plant specimens of one sort or another, from where we got to Mexico, he did not have access to the arboretum database. But he could go on to tell me quite a lot about the Wellingtonia of Kew and their cataloguing. This one was probably the 13,710th tree catalogued in the 1969 cataloguing campaign, probably not long after computers reached Kew.
A rather different, but not contradictory, story about Miconia calvescens is to be found at reference 3. Another botanical oddity.
One clearly needs to be careful with these things. Just like power tools as far as that goes.
PS 3: a little alive to McDonald's this morning, having watched the first half of the film at reference 4 last night. Another Prime offering: informative and entertaining, if a little creaky.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/wellingtonia-133.html.
Reference 2: https://www.osteria-dei-sapori-restaurant-fuveau.fr/.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miconia_calvescens.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Founder.
Group search key: wgc.
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