A love letter to the trees that saved a man’s life
THE Night of the Big Wind swept across Ireland, without warning, on January 6, 1839. The most ferocious hurricane in the country’s history wrecked 42 ships and destroyed almost a quarter of the houses in Dublin.
Sixty miles north-west of Dublin, in the 12 acres of rolling parkland surrounding the neo-gothic castle of the Earls of Longford, the storm decapitated a stately specimen of the silver fir (abies alba).
Some 170 years l ater, this fir has miraculously regenerated, turning its six upper branches into trunks and shooting up like a candelabra.
Today, it stands a giddy 137 ft tall. Its custodian, Thomas Pakenham (8th Earl of Longford, though he prefers not to use the title), says he would die to protect it.
Pakenham only realised the depths of his dendrophilia after a storm felled several of his ancient beeches in 1991.
‘ I had been responsible f or these extraordinary objects,’ he says, ‘and I had taken them for granted.’
He stopped writing the military histories to which he had dedicated the first half of his life, and has been collecting, planting and writing about trees ever since.
His beautiful catalogue of the greatest living structures in the British Isles — Meetings With Remarkable Trees —became a surprise bestseller in 1996.
His new book pays tribute to the trees on the family estate he inherited, aged just 27, in 1961. The young Oxford graduate had just started work as a cub reporter on the Sunday Telegraph when his uncle Edward — the 6th Earl — died suddenly at 58.
His father, Frank, inherited the title but, by dint of an unusual family settlement, the bulk of the fortune passed to Thomas.
Sexist tradition meant his elder sister (biographer Lady Antonia Fraser) was bypassed.
‘I felt like someone who had won the lottery’, he says, ‘and in a sense I had: the lottery of birth.’ Pakenham’s inheritance included the crumbling Pakenham Hall (which he immediately restored to its original Irish name of Tullynally) and the surrounding land: 1,000 acres of boggy farmland grazed by half-bred heifers and bullocks, two small Ferguson tractors and 500 acres of gardens and woods.
It had all belonged to the Pakenhams since 1665. The snag came in the form of death duties, levied at 62 per cent.
‘I would start my new career as a farmer up to my ears in debt,’ he writes. So the only trees he planted in the first 20 years as he struggled keep the estate afloat were destined for the chainsaw.
He filled 30 acres with grim, regimented rows of commercial spruce, but cherished the ancient oak, beech and sweet chestnut beneath whose boughs his ancestors had walked — even though some have macabre histories.
One row of beech trees was planted in the 1760s to block the view of a hill that was used to hang local criminals. ‘The ladies had no wish to see a line of corpses dangling in the wind,’ says Pakenham.
The more you read of the various Earls’
attempts to create beautiful views across their parkland, the more you realise they struggle with the same problems the rest of us face when designing our own little gardens.
The only difference is that they’re working on a massive scale, and thinking in centuries instead of years.
In his own time, Pakenham has brought in trees from further afield — adding a Chinese garden with a pagoda, and a Tibetan garden of waterfalls and streams.
He waxes poetic about Eastern flora, praising the ‘sensuous’ bark of the Himalayan birch (Betula utilis), and saying: ‘You could compose a love letter on the flaking sheets that uncoil from the trunks’.
Raising all his own saplings from seed, he comes across like a real-life version of P. G. Wodehouse’s amiable (if unworldly) Lord Emsworth, pottering about with his seed trays and compost in his ancestral kitchen.
But he engages fully with the 21st-century threat of global warming, as well as the four new diseases threatening our trees: acute oak decline, sudden oak death, ash dieback and pseudomonas syringae — a lethal canker of horse chestnuts that has infected 49 per cent of the tree species in England, according to a recent survey.
It was a belt of rhododendrons that saved his life in July 2013 after a fire took hold on his 50 acres of wild peat-bog.
A month shy of his 80th birthday, Pakenham trekked out there alone to survey the damage, and got trapped by the flames.
Luckily, t he 40 f t green wall of rhododendrons acted like a fire curtain and, although it took him an hour to crawl out beneath them on his stomach, ‘burrowing like a rat’, Pakenham emerged into the line of spruces he’d planted in the Sixties — now ready for the chop.
Lost in his own woods, he bedded down for the night — it was later discovered he was lying only yards from the road.
As William Blake wrote in 1799: ‘The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.’