Have you ever stopped to wonder what a particular place looked like a generation or so ago?I for one, until relatively recently, had been guilty of not giving much thought to the plants that came before the ones I saw in front of me in the Walsingham nature reserves (more commonly known as Tom Moore’s Jungle). It came as quite a surprise to learn that Walsingham looked very different just a few decades ago!Take a walk through the Walsingham reserves today and the dominant (most common) plant there is Surinam cherry, Eugenia uniflora, with tunnel-like paths formed by the cherry branches meeting overhead.Surinam cherry is native to tropical America and was introduced to Bermuda. It may have been the “cherries” and “sherries” mentioned by Governor Hamilton in 1790, but it was definitely here by 1840 since it was mentioned in an inventory of the estate at Orange Valley in Devonshire in 1840.So what grew there in Walsingham before the cherry trees? Originally there would have been a forest of native and endemic plants dominated by cedar, but also including palmetto, olivewood, hackberry, Lamark’s trema and white stopper as well as numerous other smaller plants. (For an inkling of what that pre-colonial forest might have looked like, visit the decades old restoration area in the Idwal Hughes Reserve but watch out for poison ivy!)According to Dr David Wingate, the scale epidemic killed virtually every cedar in Walsingham and it was then that the simple-leaved jasmine vine became dominant, growing, like a mat over everything giving the area its other name of Tom Moore’s Jungle.Today, you have to look quite hard to find simple-leaved jasmine. The biggest change there in Wingate’s memory “has been the gradual shading out of the jasmine by the spreading thickets of Surinam cherry, and a gradual increase in fiddlewood, allspice and Chinese fan palm, but the latter two are still uncommon there, relatively speaking, being more recent invaders. Only in the last 10 to 15 years have I noticed a new wave of change in the Walsingham flora and this is the aggressive invasion by Indian laurel and Australian umbrella tree which is going to make the canopy even taller and more deeply shaded. The former poses the gravest threat of all to the relic native flora there.”So, go for a walk through Tom Moore’s Jungle. Really look at the plants there. See the Surinam Cherry forest, identify the fiddlewood trees, look for the Indian laurels growing as strangler figs (often in cedars), count the allspice trees and Chinese fan palms.Make memories and promise yourself or your companions to go back in a decade and then another decade to see what changes have occurred.