It’s 25 years since Michael Fish’s famous weather forecast went horribly wrong on the evening before The Great Storm of 1987. He chuckled about a woman who had telephoned earlier to say there was hurricane on the way. I remember October 16 well. My mother, who lived in West London, telephoned before 7am to tell me not to send the children to school. She had woken in the early hours to the sound of crashing timber and every tree lining her suburban road was either down, or badly damaged. At nearby Kew Gardens, the wind had taken out 700 trees. One of them, the Chinese Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), had come crashing down on the newly-restored King William Temple. The fact that the trees were still in leaf allowed them to fall like open sails on a schooner. If the Great Storm had come two weeks later and blown through bare branches many of the trees would have spared. The Great Storm caused consternation at the time, but good things come out of tragedy and that includes hurricanes. I, for instance, was asked to write a story for The Telegraph about the resurgence of a rare Magnolia sargentiana var. robusta growing at High Beeches in West Sussex. It was been propped up after the Great Storm and went on to produce thousands of flowers ten years later, kick-starting my career as a Telegraph writer. Tony Russell, a well-known authority on trees, thinks the Great Storm did us a favour in other ways. It taught us that trees were being planted far too close together in gardens and arboreta. This resulted in poor root systems and tall spindly growth. Both made their centre of gravity unnaturally high, making them unstable in winter winds particularly when the ground was saturated, as in October 1987.

“We know now that spacing is really important and we give newly-planted trees much more room,” Tony explained. Planting techniques have changed since the storm too. Once round holes were dug and then filled with rich compost: this encouraged the roots to stay in the planting pit.

“They did not need to spread out laterally in order to search for nutrients and moisture,” Tony added.

In severe cases the roots became almost ‘pot-bound’ and with only a few wide-spreading roots they were poorly anchored into the ground. Nowadays arborists dig a square (or rectangular) shallow planting pit without adding a lot of rich compost. This encourages a wide-spreading root system capable of hold the tree up in a storm. We are about to enter the bare-root planting season when field-grown shrubs, roses and trees of every type are lifted and sold. It’s possible to see the root systems and trim the roots before you spread them out. In spring the tree or shrub breaks dormancy and immediately takes root. This is an excellent way of establishing woody plants more cheaply, although rarer trees still tend to be grown in containers. Use a tree nursery that moves stock regularly, rather than a garden centre where a plant can linger for months. Ornamental Trees have a good selection — 01257 265232/ www.ornamental-trees.co.uk Buckingham Nurseries also sell bare-root hedging and trees — 01280 822133/ www.hedging.co.uk