So there you have it: admirers can enjoy this magnificent tree where it stands; detractors can simply enjoy products made from it instead.. Capability Brown seems to have used it occasionally as a specimen (for example at Ugbrooke Park in Devon), and selected forms, particularly the variegated kind, continued to be planted throughout the 19th century.Its historic credentials aside, a mature sycamore is a most handsome tree. Next time you're visiting a country house or garden, look out into the park and make your own judgement. You can recognise a sycamore by its dappled pink-and-grey bark, its heavy, curving lower limbs and its broad dome.If you are not convinced by the aesthetic argument and require practical reasons for selecting your trees, sycamore is a great doer in exposed situations; it is tolerant of salt winds and thrives in shade. It also produces fine, easily worked timber that can be turned to produce, among other things, those huge wooden bowls that you see in antique shops. Perhaps this is because ash is a native whereas sycamore is a relative newcomer; it has been with us probably only since medieval times and therefore has still to be accepted.

Newcomers to an English village will empathise.Once upon a time, sycamore was actually rather fashionable. Today, many people consider sycamore little better than a weed; it seeds freely in gardens and lawns and can appear to choke unmanaged hedgerows. In my experience, ash is just as invasive and just as difficult to eradicate but, in general, people are far more tolerant of it. Apart from the roads programme, it is difficult to conceive of a greater abuse of our countryside. However, before we make a grab for the nearest chainsaw, it is worth reminding ourselves that this is not the fault of the tree itself, but of the people who plant it.Sycamore is another tree in need of some slick PR. As long ago as the 17th century, the great John Evelyn was bemoaning the fact that its leaves "turn to mucilage and noxious insects, and putrefy with the first moisture of the season; and are, therefore, by my consent, to be banished from all curious gardens and avenues". It is a victim of its own success, however, for these qualities have so endeared themselves that it is now planted everywhere: a dangerous weapon in the hands of gardeners and landowners who lack sensitivity to the nature of landscape.Lines of leylandii marching across the countryside shriek "suburbia" as surely as pony paddock fences do.

There is a wonderful example at Bicton Park, Devon, and another at Wakehurst Place, Sussex. The truth is that few of us have the space to grow leylandii properly and so it is those looking for a quick screen who have claimed the plant for their own.Considered dispassionately, its growth rate, tolerance of exposure and ability to withstand drastic pruning would be considered assets in most other trees and shrubs. They sell some of the produce from the kitchen garden in the visitor's shop There were fat, bursting figs on the day I visited. I'm hoping some of those white-fleshed peaches might be on offer.The gardens at West Dean (01243 818210), five miles north of Chichester, West Sussex are open every day until the end of October (11am-5pm) Admission pounds 3.. Two of the fastest growing plants in this country have become two of the most scorned. Yet attitudes to leylandii and sycamore are not entirely fair. Few gardeners will be unaware of the extraordinary effect that leylandii can have on normal, law-abiding citizens.