Double vision Frank Ronan’s imagination runs wild at the thought of planting an avenue
A request from a friend to suggest plants suitable to line an Italian avenue allows Frank to indulge in one of his favourite fantasies
An avenue is quite a thing: more idea than fact, depending, as it does, on all the constituents surviving into maturity and growing at more or less the same rate. The planters of avenues, being of necessity rich and possessed of more land than they need, will probably not be young and must suffer agonies in the attempt to survive to see a return on their plantation. The pity I express is a poor disguise for envy. Who would not want to send double lines of trees marching across the landscape? What better way to end your days than by watching the gaps close as whips thicken to saplings and then cautiously begin to coat their broadening arms with lichen?
My favourite is at Castle Kennedy, in Galloway, where among eight single species avenues is one of monkey puzzles, along which guests would be taken after dinner on summer evenings (I was told) to feed pet codfish in a sea pool on the shore. Should anyone know this story to be untrue, please resist writing to tell me. The other monkey puzzle avenue that I know of I knew first, at Woodstock in Inistioge, near where I grew up, but that had no codfish story to animate it. An avenue must be more idea than fact.
These thoughts are triggered by a friend writing from the banks of the Po for advice on planting an avenue. The climate is vile: sweltering summers and blistering winters. The soil is alkaline, but she likes that idea of using hydrangeas, and mentions also that mulberries were once common in that part of Italy when there was a silk industry. The avenue is to be thirty metres long, and I have to resist speculating whether that falls within the definition. Just thinking in terms of avenue is too exciting to spoil.
Running through the hydrangeas I know it doesn’t take me long to stop at H. quercifolia. The best examples I’ve ever seen were in New York, where the climate is unpleasant in similar ways. Then, to make an actual avenue of it, as opposed to a shrub-lined drive, I suggested a white mulberry every six metres. Black mulberries would be better, obviously, were it not that they are being inserted in a historical context. You don’t want to be explaining your avenue to your guests only to have the smart alec (it would be me) pointing out the fruit and laughing at you for getting it wrong.
The mulberries, eventually, would be pollarded, which fits in nicely with the supine rice fields of the landscape (which I don’t know that well, but was thinking pollarded willows and Somerset Levels), and would keep them in proportion. My friend writes in excitement to suggest we go on a buying expedition to a nursery near Turin. I then notice that in her original mail she used the word ‘driveway.’ Avenue was in my imagination. An avenue is only an idea, not a fact. She was lining a short drive and I had conjured the processions of Good King Henry across the whole of France.
There are worse fantasies to have. Once, a charismatic druid fantasised about avenues of stone on Salisbury Plain, and an entire society was bent to his whim. Some farmer, on the road between us and Bridgnorth, put copper beeches in the hedges both sides and now that part of the journey is an utter delight. We have a peculiar, childish desire to travel between identical, regularly spaced objects. To come home saluted by orderly trees is an ideal that most of us will never know, but when we experience it elsewhere we still feel the deep satisfaction of it. I regularly waste time in thinking, if I ever planted an avenue (and my house is too close to the road to admit a single tree), what it would be. Just now I favour a mile of swamp cypresses. I have yet to think of a better object than feeding the codfish.
Who would not want to send double lines of trees marching across the landscape?