Great Big Green Week

This group of cherries and silver birch stand on the footpath leading from Spring Lane on the corner of the horse pond, across the wild meadow, doglegging back to Howe Road and access across the fields to the Willow pond. The path is well used by dog walkers, and children often play around and in the horse pond, which is one of the few 'wild' places for imaginative outside play in natural surroundings by Watlington.

We moved into the new corner house adjacent the pond in 1995, when the old allotments were developed by Banner Homes: the pond overflows through a culvert into the head of a chalk stream which flows into Brook St past our back garden, and the sound of the rushing water is a balm, until the stream dries, usually about august time.

As a housewarming present, my father bought me 2 cherry and one silver birch trees, one of which arrived in an envelope through the post!, one of his last gifts before he died. For 5 years, I potted them on until they were large enough to plant out by the pond at the millennium. Together with the Hazel stand on the corner of the pond and reinforced with further planting, they now help form an effective screen to Stonor Green.

They now tower 70 feet high, and the Cherry Blossom falls like snow in May. In the planning,

Stonor Green had to be a 'landscape-led' design with extensive[ for the time] tree planting, and this group helps tie the development into the broad settlement landscape such that now, from the top of Watlington Hill, the houses are almost invisible in summer. In the group, Blue and Great tits are common, green finches, gold finches, dunnocks and robins are frequent visitors, together with less welcome woodpigeons and squirrels.

David Parker. May 2025 

#GreatBigGreenWeek

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