South Hams District Council No: 1113 Tree Preservation Order 2025 – please contact SHDC to express your support and request that this be made a permanent TPO. More details below. Write for the attention of the TPO Case Management Team at Follaton House, Plymouth Road, Totnes TQ9 5NE or email TPO@swdevon.gov.uk. Thank you!

Anyone who has visited my Hunters Moon home (1 Coach House) will be familiar with the beautiful stone pine tree which has stood at the heart of the gardens here for over 100 years. It is beloved by human visitors, by the birds (such as this wood pigeon, above) who nest and feed there and by many other creatures. Along with other nearby, mature evergreens and the ancient oaks, it is a striking part of our Hunters Moon hilltop tree-scape and its distinctive domed shape can be seen from the Hunters Moon allotments, top green and road. I recently secured a six month Tree Preservation Order (TPO) to protect this iconic tree. Please help me to encourage SHDC to give this special tree permanent protection. Below are more details about the significance of this tree and how to help it – thank you!

Stone pines (pinus pinea) are native to the Mediterranean and it is rare to find one of this age and size in the UK. One of the oldest, planted in 1846 (about 50 years before our Hunters Moon one) was a prized tree at Kew Gardens until it sadly fell in 2022, due to having spent its first century in a pot! There is another well known stone pine in London, of a similar age and size to ours. As the London Trees Blog states: ‘This enormous and rare Stone Pine tree on the south-west side of Richmond Green, is acknowledged as one of the great trees of London’. How fortunate we are to have a comparable great tree here in Dartington. It forms part of the original planting for the Edwardian estate (you can see it here alongside Hunters Moon House, above) that preceded the current modernist one and thus is part of the historic heritage of Hunters Moon. Left to flourish, it could still be here for several more hundreds of years.

Unlike some other trees, pines are very sensitive to trimming as they don’t regrow from cut branches. Stone pines in particular naturally form a lovely, domed shape, which gives them their other common name of ‘umbrella pine’. So inappropriate trimming risks both damaging and disfiguring the tree. Although this is illegal under Common Law and therefore can lead to prosecution, this can be too late to save the tree, hence the importance of a TPO. Our Hunters Moon stone pine now has a temporary TPO and yet needs all our support for this to remain in place. A TPO can be granted for rare and unique specimen trees, especially if they have amenity value and can be seen and enjoyed by the wider community. As you can see in the photo above, it is visible from from our allotments, as well as from the green where we have our community picnics and our street.

Stone pines have been valued by humans and wildlife since pre-historic times. Their large cones contain the ‘pine nuts’ that we may know from pizza & pesto, while their dense foliage makes great nesting and roosting sites for birds. Mature trees have thick, fissured bark (as shown above), providing refuge for insects and in turn good feeding grounds for larger creatures. It is known as a pioneer species as it is shallow rooted and can survive in poor, stony soil like our local shillet, while its umbrella-like shelter helps create a more inviting habitat for other plants and animals, such that it is recognised as contributing to biodiversity. The photo below shows how it sits at the centre of several local gardens and properties, offering shade in our increasingly hot summers and protection during increasingly stormy winters.

I hope you will join me in speaking up for this unique member of our community:

South Hams District Council No:1113 Tree Preservation Order 2025

Please contact SHDC to express your support for this TPO and request that this be made a permanent. Write for the attention of the TPO Case Management Team at Follaton House, Plymouth Road, Totnes TQ9 5NE or email TPO@swdevon.gov.uk. Thank you!