Tony Kirkham – author, TV personality and Curator of the Arboretum at Kew will give an out of hours tour of the gardens for up to 10 people culminating in a champagne reception at the top of the Tree Top Walk. He will talk later.

You might think of trees as low maintenance, but with 14,000 specimens at Kew – 500 planted in the last year alone – arboriculture is a constant activity requiring lots of planning. With his team of 47 staff, Tony Kirkham ensures the informed curation of the woody collections, the health of the trees and the safety of visitors walking in the Arboretum.

In the last few years, William Nesfield’s historic Pagoda Vista, Syon Vista, and Broad Walk have all been renovated with new plantings. These trees will mature over the next 150 years, and are planned to provide scientific and educational value as well as being decorative.

Management of the oldest specimen trees can be complex, and recent pioneering work uses  -ground decompaction and mycorrhizal inoculation to replicate nature in maintaining the health of trees’ unseen root systems.

Kirkham came to Kew in 1978 as a Diploma student and progressed to become Head of the Arboretum in 2001. The great storm of 1987, when Kew lost 500 mature trees overnight, was a turning point for him. The resulting programme of replacement has meant many collecting trips in China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Russian Far East, and he is now one of Kew’s most active plant collectors.

He co-wrote Plants from the Edge of the World (2005), has been featured in the BBC TV series A Year at Kew, and will be presenting a new series, The Trees That Made Britain, from 15 September 2006. He is shown speaking into a microphone coming out of a Hydrangea species from Asia.