Don’t ask me to identify a tree. I may be the person who invented and co-founded the Urban Tree Festival but I left it to cleverer people to identify the trees we were celebrating. 

Over the next four weeks there’s a call out for people to walk in support of the Lebanon Mountain Trail. This trail runs down the spine of Lebanon from north to south, connecting scores of communities. With the latest turn in the war in the Middle East many of those communities are under military bombardment and others have swollen with people fleeing from the urban centres.

Later this month, I will be walking parts of the Wales Coast path but in the meantime, to show my support, I am seeking out Cedars of Lebanon – that’s the tree. So my first port of call would have to be The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew as there I could at least be assured that the tree had been labelled correctly.

So off we went to Kew, my partner Melly Sutton and I, and indeed we did find an example of the Cedar of Lebanon (see feature image). The tree itself is fairly magnificent and was apparently planted in the 18th century close to what is now the site of the pagoda at the southern end of the gardens. It was moved however, as it grew so tall that it threatened to obscure the view of the pagoda. It now stands as the backdrop to a Japanese pavilion. Cedars of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) originate from Lebanon and other parts of the Mediterranean Middle East and apparently are quite scarce there, as they are unable to cope with the more extreme heat brought on by climate change.

They were clearly a passion for Victorian plantsman in the 19th century. The owners of grand houses made an effort to plant at least one in their gardens. Not many survive – one of London’s best known in Highgate West Cemetery succumbed to parasites – there is one however, in Sydenham Hill Wood (South London). It is more than a dozen years since I went to look at it. Although I have been in the area more recently when interviewing Richly Evocative blogger Matt Gilbert for Talking Walking, I haven’t been anywhere close to where the cedar grows. It is a remnant of a Victorian mansion house and garden, which was demolished when the railway was tunnelled to reach the Crystal Palace, once the glasshouses of the Great Exhibition had been moved from Hyde Park.

A dozen years and substantial conservation management by the London Wildlife Trust funded at the time through a project to try to preserve as much of the Great North Wood, as this remnant of ancient woodland is called, the woods themselves look very different from the woods that I used to walk through. I struggled to find the cedar I was looking for, especially as this patch of Sydenham Hill Woods has become a popular place for people to have planted their leftover Christmas trees!

So if you are out walking in the next few weeks, why not walk to support the people of Lebanon, and the communities that are linked by the Lebanon Mountain Trail in particular. Find out more as to how you can from this website, and should you happen to know of a Cedar of Lebanon growing close to where you live or walk, do share your discovery on social media, tagging walk · listen · create and the Urban Tree Festival.

And as my partner Melly reminds me, come May, she will be offering tree meditations online, including one on the Cedar of Lebanon, at this year‘s Urban Tree Festival.