Wellingtonia 135

Wellingtonia 135 was captured in the margins of a visit to Nonsuch Park.

Spotted from the A232 in what turned out to be the (inaccessible) grounds of Cheam Cricket Club. Things seemed clear enough from a distance, but as close I as could get, I worried about the brown sheen to the lower branches, not previously - or not recently - noticed. But back home, a visit to reference 2 convinced me that all was well: the brown sheen was the male pollen cones.

In the road behind, we had this very thin conifer, a bit lost in the snap above in visual clutter.

But this did not stop Google Images this morning which, on a cropped version, says Serbian spruce. Which I had thought of but discounted on the grounds that it seemed too different from the one he had previously identified in our road. Previously noticed several times at reference 3, but not, for some reason, including a full-length snap like that above. A job for today.

But did he add his remarks about turned up branches after he had made the identification, or were they part of that identification? Clear enough in the snap above, but not a feature I remember from the specimen in our road. Not that there is anything wrong with a mixture of top-down and bottom-up thinking: all a question of balance.

Or, thinking here with my fingers, perhaps the answer is more prosaic. Google Images looks for features, scores them in some way, and then matches the combined score - possibly a real valued, non-negative, one dimensional vector - with his database of trees, with the answer being the best match. Which might or might not involve turned up branches.

PS 1: location according to Ordnance Survey (OS). Orange spot marks the tree spot.

And, for present purposes with rather better labelling, according to gmaps. Neither map seems to include the nearby foodie house, one of the Grumpy Mole collection, previously regular public houses for the sale of beer, wine and spirits.

I was also irritated, not for the first time, by a publicly funded school - Nonsuch High School for Girls - sporting an advertisement for a branch of the David Lloyd chain. As a lefty, nostalgic for the days when schools could concentrate on schooling rather than on revenue.

PS 2: Monday: I have now inspected our Serbian pine and it does indeed exhibit the turned up tips to its branches, said to be a feature of the species.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/wellingtonia-134.html.

Reference 2: https://www.treeguideuk.co.uk/giant-sequoia/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=serbian+spruce.

Group search keys: 20260327, wgc (a relic of from before the days of the search key suffix).