Gentry’s craze was aped in the suburbs

NOT FAR from where I live there’s a forestry plantation of lodge-pole pines. If you look at it from a distance you’ll notice an odd, umbrella-shaped tree in the middle of the plantation that towers over the pines.

When you get a bit closer you’ll find that the incongruous tree is one of a species that everyone can recognise — a monkey puzzle.

Years ago an old man told me the story of that tree. Once there was a big house and an estate on that spot. But there was some incident during the Troubles, the gentry left and the house burned down, or maybe was burned down. Later the State forestry service acquired the land and planted the lodge-pole pines. For some reason they left the old monkey puzzle, the last surviving relic of former glory.

The proper English name for the tree is the Chile pine. The name monkey puzzle was a joke by an English estate owner in the 19th century.

There are two distinct native populations of the Chile pine. One is in the coastal mountains of Chile and the other in the Chilean Andes. This second population just crosses the border into southern Argentina.

They belong to a small group of southern hemisphere conifers and the only related species that is in any way common in cultivation in this country is the Norfolk Island pine, which is tender and always grown as a pot plant.

The first European to see Chile pines was a Spanish government official, Don Francisco Dendariarena, who was prospecting for ship-building timber along the Chilean coast in 1780. In 1795 Archibald Menzies, who was the surgeon aboard Captain Vancouver’s ship the Discovery, collected some cones and sowed the seed in pots on board ship.

He eventually got back to England with six plants, five of which he presented to the Botanic Gardens in Kew. Here they were grown under glass until 1808 when they experimented with planting one outdoors. It survived until 1892.

Once it had been demonstrated that the species was hardy enough to survive outside there was a craze for planting it. This craze was confined to Britain and Ireland. Most of the rest of the world seems to believe they are among the ugliest trees in the world and want to have nothing to do with them. I tend to agree.

The craze started on big estates because many of the landed gentry who owned them were avid and competitive collectors of exotic trees. But in the very class-conscious society of the mid-19th century, some of the middle classes aped their betters and planted monkey puzzles in the gardens of their new suburban villas. Here they looked even more outlandish.

The species grows better and faster in Ireland than in Britain. It grows even faster in Chile, where it can live to be 500-years-old and reach a height of nearly 40 metres. It grows in open stands at high altitudes, usually with an under-storey of various species of Nothofagus or southern beech. At one time it was an important timber tree but wild stands are now rare and largely protected.

It’s quite easy to propagate provided both male and female mature trees are present. It produces large cones among the topmost branches that take three years to ripen and contain about 200 seeds.

Because it’s easy to propagate and because of the Victorian craze, monkey puzzles are distributed all around the country, the larger specimens in what are, or were, old estates. The largest recorded for Ireland is on the Caledon Estate in Co Tyrone. The more modest one down the road in the lodge-poles looks lonely and out of place — like a dinosaur in a herd of cattle.

[e-mail]