The tree-hunting aristocrat smuggling seeds from China in his socks
As you bend left down the drive at Tullynally Castle, County Westmeath, what looks like a medieval walled town rises to greet you – turrets, arrow-slits and witch’s hat towers, stitched together by hundreds of yards of battlements. The Pakenham family have been in residence here since the mid-17th century. The current incumbent, Thomas Pakenham, 91, and his late wife, Valerie, transformed the estate. In the 63 years since he inherited it from his uncle, the 6th Earl of Longford, the couple have been dedicated to rediscovering and reinvigorating its sprawling gardens.
Pakenham, a cousin of mine, has planted thousands of trees, growing them from seed and creating his own arboretum. These new plants complement the older trees – including mammoth beeches and “The Squire’s Walking Stick”, the tallest oak in Ireland at 112ft, planted by the 1st Baron Longford in 1745. While transforming Tullynally, he has also written bestselling histories, including The Boer War (1979) and The Scramble for Africa (1992), as well as various books about his passion for plants, including Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996) and Remarkable Trees of the World (2002), which have sold in their hundreds of thousands.
As part of his horticultural endeavours, Pakenham has travelled the globe, smuggling seeds in his socks (”to stop the customs getting too nosy”) from Tibet, China and Outer Mongolia. He has then watched them take root and grow back home in Ireland. Here, at Tullynally, he has created a Chinese garden, complete with pagoda, with all the trees and plants grown from seeds he collected in Yunnan, China, in 1993. He introduced blue poppies grown from Tibetan seeds; Primula poissonii from seeds collected in the snow in Sichuan, China; giant Himalayan lilies and Sorbus pseudohupehensis from Yunnan. On one tree-hunting trip to Sikkim, India, he struggled 3,500ft up Mount Maenam and then stumbled down in darkness through a dense forest, populated with bears and leopards.
Earlier this year, he had a rare hydrangea named after him, Pakenham’s Prize, which has been added to the national collection of Irish Heritage Plants. He brought the seeds back with him from Sichuan 30 years ago, and the plant is now flourishing at Tullynally. His collection also includes what Pakenham refers to as “Duck Trees” (he visited one British botanical garden where he fed the ducks while surreptitiously gathering rare tree seeds).
The Tullynally collection includes the two great rarities for tree aficionados – so-called “discovery trees” because they are the only two new genera to be discovered in recent years. They are Metasequoia glyptostroboides, the dawn redwood, found in China in 1941, and the Wollemi pine, found in Australia in 1994. One of the oldest and rarest plants in the world, in 2005 a batch of Wollemi pine saplings was sold at auction for £487,000 at Sotheby’s in Sydney.
There is no threat of Thomas importing diseases with his trees because he has only ever brought seeds back from his travels. Infections such as ash dieback and Dutch elm disease are thought to have been carried in fungal spores in the wooden pallets that housed mass tree imports from abroad.
Thomas’s latest book is The Tree Hunters, which combines his love of history with his passion for trees. It explores the legacy of the pioneers who, from the 17th century onwards, set off from these shores in search of undiscovered horticultural treasures, bringing back maples and pines from the American colonies, cypresses and cedars from Europe and Lebanon, and oriental planes from Greece and Turkey.
“The tree hunters were giants – all daredevils,” says Pakenham. “They risked their lives and sometimes lost them, and they were paid next to nothing. There were dangers of every kind – and no maps. They went to places that had never been explored.”
These botanical buccaneers included John Tradescant (1570-1638), who went hunting for apricot trees from the Barbary Coast of north Africa and fir trees from the wilds of Arctic Russia in the 1800s. His son, also named John (1608-62), later headed for Virginia and returned with the red maple, swamp cypress and tulip tree. The dangers some of these men faced as part of their quest were hair-raising. Missionary and naturalist John Banister (1654-92), for example, was accidentally shot dead while exploring the Roanoke River in Virginia. Before he died, however, he managed to send back seeds for the first magnolia, the sweetbay, to Britain.
Banister was also responsible for introducing the liquidambar, or sweetgum tree, to Europe, which is the latest addition to Tullynally’s gardens. Thirty of them now glow a glorious red-gold in a forest glade after being planted by Pakenham’s son-in-law, Sir Alex Chisholm (former permanent secretary to the cabinet office), to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his marriage to Eliza Pakenham, a writer, and the second of Thomas and Valerie’s four children.
Most dramatic of all was the tragic fate of David Douglas, who risked his life in the wilds of what is now Oregon and California to track down the seeds of trees that today dominate British arboretums and forestry: the noble fir, Sitka spruce, Monterey pine and Douglas fir, which was named after him. A mighty Douglas fir looms over the end of the Forest Walk at Tullynally, dwarfing Pakenham and me as we stroll by.
In his American tree-hunting adventures, Douglas was attacked by a grizzly bear and lost his scientific instruments, food and clothes, along with the seeds of 400 species of trees and plants, in a whirlpool.
The tree hunters’ seeds helped to fuel a new British craze: the arboretum. In 1759, the word was first used in reference to a small collection of trees planted for Princess Augusta at Kew, later transformed by her son, George III, and now the site of the Royal Botanic Gardens.
Arboreal one-upmanship was particularly popular among the Dukes of Devonshire, Bedford and Marlborough. According to Pakenham, their arboretums were on a massive scale because their houses are on a massive scale. “Think of the size of Chatsworth,” he says. “[The bug for collecting] burst into life in the early 19th century, with competitions from dukes to have this plant or that plant.”
At Woburn Abbey and Chatsworth today, the respective estates of the Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire still include large remnants of their original arboretums. At Kew, there are four rare survivors of the original planting: a pagoda tree, a black locust, a sweet chestnut and a ginkgo. But the finest tree collection in Britain is at Westonbirt, Gloucestershire, now the National Arboretum.
It was begun in 1829 by wealthy landowner Robert Holford (1808-92) and expanded upon by his son, George. In 1839, Robert Holford inherited a fortune from a bachelor uncle, who had made his money speculating in foreign exchange. “They were so rich, nothing could stop them,” says Pakenham. “He [Robert] inherits the equivalent of about £100 million today. The equivalent would be a modern billionaire. There are lots of people today with £100 million but they would buy a superyacht.”
Victorian arboretums still survive, including at Sheffield, Nottingham and Derby, but many are struggling, and some have disappeared altogether. “An arboretum needs constant management,” says Pakenham. “Plants die with amazing speed, they need enthusiasts.”
One of the last modern enthusiasts is Michael Heseltine, the former deputy prime minister. At his country home, Thenford House in Northamptonshire, Lord Heseltine has built up an arboretum covering 70 acres, with more than 3,000 trees and shrubs. A friend of Pakenham’s, Lord Heseltine sent a whitebeam tree to Tullynally. In a speech celebrating Pakenham’s 90th birthday held at Kew last year, Lord Heseltine said of him, “We share that extraordinary privilege of being slightly bonkers about trees. He’s got a wonderful collection, he writes extensively, has travelled the world and knows what the words in Latin actually mean.”
Lord Heseltine is rare in creating such a huge arboretum. There are smaller recent British ones of around 10 acres but, given that some trees need a quarter of an acre just for themselves, you need more land to create a really magnificent collection.
Curiously, Pakenham didn’t grow up in a household that shared his love of all things botanical. His mother was the writer Elizabeth Longford, and his father was the Labour politician and prison reformer Lord Longford. “He couldn’t have told you the name of any tree,” says Pakenham. “He was completely focused on great causes. His view of the outside world was very limited; he’d been a prison visitor since he was 22. His failure to be a soldier humiliated him tremendously. His father had been a general and had died fighting [at Gallipoli, in 1915]. He [Lord Longford] needed to prove himself – and he chose prison reform as his great subject.”
The Pakenhams are also renowned for their literary output. Thomas’s aunt, Lady Violet Pakenham, was a writer and married Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time. His aunt Lady Julia Mount was my grandmother, and mother of my father, the writer Ferdinand Mount. The ink – rather than sap – in the blood doesn’t stop flowing there. Thomas’s siblings include Rachel Billington, author of 40 books, the late Judith Kazantzis, a poet, and the historian Lady Antonia Fraser, 92.
When I interviewed Antonia Fraser for The Daily Telegraph for her 90th birthday in 2022, I asked her where the Pakenham literary gene comes from. “I deny that there is a gene – I say that it’s all me,” she said, joshingly. Pakenham disagrees: “That’s totally untrue,” he says, laughing. “It was our great-grandmother Lady Jersey, she lionised writers [such as Robert Louis Stevenson], often at Osterley [her house just outside London]. She was a salonnière.
“It was also a very big family,” he adds. “We couldn’t all be talking at the same time – so we wrote books instead.”
Lady Antonia may not acknowledge a literary gene but she does recognise Pakenham’s energy and attributes it to the polio that he suffered when he was three years old. “A few years ago, there was a threat of the polio returning,” she says. “The doctor said, ‘You should come back tomorrow for treatment.’ Thomas replied, ‘I can’t. I’ve got to go to China to collect seeds.”’
He does accept, though, that the polio had an impact. “Sometimes a setback forms a rocket that drives a person onwards,” he says. “It turned me against hospitals and doctors. I’ve always tried to keep away since. But any energy is genetic. My parents were both very energetic.”
When his childless uncle, Edward Longford, died in 1961, Pakenham was presented with a unique opportunity to indulge his love of trees. “It was a Sleeping Beauty situation,” he says. “No one had planted anything since my grandmother’s day [at Tullynally]. When I came here, I realised which trees were remarkable and which weren’t. What needed to be added and what needed to go. You’ve got to be ruthless to plan an arboretum.”
On inheriting the estate, he changed its name from Pakenham Hall back to the Gaelic original, Tullynally. “I thought it was more romantic,” he says. He has always called himself Thomas Pakenham rather than the Earl of Longford, the title he inherited on his father’s death in 2001.
“It doesn’t go well for a writer and it’s an anachronism anyway, unless you were going to sit in the House of Lords, and in my case I wouldn’t have been able to,” he says. “I could have applied to be in the queue [for a hereditary peerage in the Lords] when my father died. But English titles in Ireland are an extra anomaly. It’s ludicrous to have a hereditary senate. Valerie didn’t want to be Countess of Longford either.”
His wife Valerie Pakenham died last year, aged 83. A writer and journalist from the Berry family, which owned The Daily Telegraph from 1928 until 1986, she wrote travel guides to Dublin and Meath, and edited the letters of the 19th-century Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth.
After her 1964 marriage to Thomas, the couple cleared the gardens at Tullynally, redecorated the castle and paid off its substantial death duties by re-energising the farm with 600 cows.
“Valerie was wonderful,” says Thomas. “She was with me; beside me; ahead of me. We had to make a success of the estate. It took 15 years to pay off.” The farm is thankfully now in good health. “Some people run out of energy in their 70s,” says Pakenham. “They don’t want to take on new projects.” As he marches into his 10th decade, Thomas Pakenham, the Great Irish Tree Man, is still taking on new projects – and planting more trees.
The Tree Hunters: How the Cult of the Arboretum Transformed Our Landscape by Thomas Pakenham (W&N, £30), will be published on 24 October. Tullynally Castle and Gardens is open to the public (tullynallycastle.ie)
