Chris Watts has been a volunteer Estate Guide at Tyntesfield since 2006 and it didn’t take him long to realise how fascinating the trees are. He knew very little about trees when he started but is now introduced to people as the ‘Tree Man’; Tyntesfield’s very own (very amateur!) dendrologist.
Not too long after Chris started volunteering he was asked to help input details of Tyntesfield’s trees into the National Trust’s main plant database and has been doing that ever since. He also measures many of the trees and passes on the details of any potential champion trees to the Tree Register of the British Isles for inclusion in their records. The Trust is in the process of changing databases so no doubt he will be busy.
All this is a far cry from his day job of a television Director of Photography from which he be retiring in April 2019 after 50 years of making TV.