Tony Kirkham, Head of the Arboretum and Horticultural Services at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, will be our speaker at the meeting of April 18th. At Kew, in addition to many other responsibilities, he is responsible for the management of 10,000 trees in the arboretum, keeping horticultural and arboricultural records of the living collections, and overseeing a permanent staff of 28 people and four students. He was also Kew trained, in addition to working with a commercial tree surgeon in Germany, attending the Merrist Wood Agricultural College in Surrey, England, and, initially, serving a forestry apprenticeship.

I won’t go into the various advisory boards on which he has served, the institutions for which he has acted as consultant, the conferences and workshops in which he has participated or organized, or the numerous organizations for which he has been a speaker, but I must mention that he has been on several plant collecting expeditions, often as leader, in Chile, South Korea, Taiwan, the Russian far east, central China, and Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese island. He has also published numerous articles, mainly on trees and other woody plants, in prestigious horticultural journals, several in collaboration with Mark Flanagan, who, many of you will remember, was our excellent April speaker last year.

Tony’s lecture is entitled ‘The fall and rise of the Arboretum at Kew: History and development from 1759 to the future’. Kew is arguably the most distinguished botanical garden in the world. And it contains many rhododendrons, on which there will be some emphasis in the lecture. The subject of this lecture, then, should be of considerable interest to all our VRS members. It is hard to imagine anyone more qualified to give it than Tony Kirkham.

Tony Kirkham