Want to get back to your roots in 2017? Just plant a tree!
Lyrical. Magical. And delightfully eccentric ... GRIFF RHYS JONES on his lifelong passion
Somewhere between the Buck’s Fizz and the postNew Year bottle bank, our thoughts inevitably turn to the passage of time. we all notice the end of another year and the beginning of a new one. It’s pagan.
Gloomy thoughts of mortality, inevitability, mutability and funeral expenses tend to wallow up, unbidden, alongside the champagne flute and the family row. I have my own solution — plant trees. Get your hands dirty and dig holes for twigs. Trees are a solace and balm. Trees ground you. They connect you with the eternal.
And this is the time of year I get thinking about my arboreal responsibilities. Not just because I am basking in the warmth of my log-filled stove — though that’s a good enough reason — but because the frost and the wintry landscape should be a spur to consider our enormous organic companions. Am I unhealthily obsessed with trees? Perhaps. There is a reason for this. I bought a house and rolling acre in Suffolk years ago, and then my neighbours started muttering about extending their demesne, so I stepped in and bought up the fields back and front.
It was not really a huge area, but, after I had planted it with grass, it certainly looked like it was. Two vast and empty bare recreation grounds stretched away.
It was like living in the middle of a turf farm. A broad plain. The Suffolk Steppe. my own featureless sward.
I needed incident. So I drew up plans, wandered about with bits of cane and plonked in some trees, dreaming of a bosky park laid out by Capability Jones. Yes, I know what you are thinking — ‘dream on, mate’.
Go to a National Trust property and you wonder what these original owners thought they were doing. we may enjoy the massive oaks and the towering beeches, the distant copse and the leafy vista, but the people who stuck them in must have looked out on a few withered saplings and spindly sticks for most of their lifetimes. Trees take yonks to put up a show, don’t they? we all know that. except they don’t. my personal forest is really quite a statement now. It’s not quite like eating your own tomatoes every year, but there are satisfactions in the exponential growth of a holm oak from the very beginning. It’s not been without its trials. I wanted an approach avenue. I planted a nice double row of crab apples, so I could walk along something grand and fluffy.
The planners came (I didn’t know that planners could have an opinion about your garden until they did). ‘Don’t plant any more rows of trees,’ said a slightly bossy woman. I reeled. She clearly thought I should be more naturalistic.
Pah. This was the very antithesis of what I was aiming at. I was a petit Le Notre, the architect of the gardens of Versailles. I wanted alleys of trees spreading off in all directions from my cottage. She thought they looked ‘unnatural’! Silly woman.
BuT the trouble with alleys is that you really notice when, after six years of waiting around for signs of growth spurts, a friend drives the tractor into one of them.
Bonk, it was gone. Like a gap in the garden’s teeth. Six years lost. It was its own fault.
It still looked like an insignificant bush, so Bob ran it down.
Alas, those crab apples have been a bit of a disappointment. That’s because I never read the labels.
I was expecting them to form a shady walk, but they were some form of dwarf tree. You think you are planting a monster, but a clever tree nurseryman has fiddled with its rootstock and produced a stunted sprig — for ever.
But I have planted all sorts. I went through a phase when every tree I planted near to the house had to work for a living. Quince, apples, fig, walnuts, pears, medlar, mulberry — they all went in.
They now produce a giant spotty fruit salad every autumn. The branches groan, the wasps gather, splodgy mounds of unpicked inedible cookers get shovelled onto the compost heap.
have you ever prepared a medlar? Interesting fruit. Called the ‘catsarse’ in less prissy times, for reasons which luckily aren’t to do with the taste, they have the flavour of a baked apple and have to be left to ‘blett’ or ripen (by which they mean rot) on the tree.
This is handy for an inveterately lazy picker like me. But they have a big messy pip to get out, and several hours of concentrated effort produce a spoonful of brown pulp. Yes, you do it once. Still, the trees have sweet white flowers.
I follow a pattern. I have not established an arboretum — this is not a stamp collection (one different tree after another blobbing about the place). I have copses of oaks, and stands of ash. I put in a lot of alders because we have wet patches and they like that and they are winsomely feathery.
And in retrospect I am glad that I planted a variety of trees, because virtually every species in the whole of existence seems now to be threatened by some ghastly disease.
Chalara dieback of ash. Chestnut blight. Dothistroma needle blight. horse chestnut bleeding canker. Sudden oak death. Although if the deadly diseases
do come my way, they will probably have a thinning effect — and I will need that. Because after 20 years (or is it 30 now?) I am beginning, perhaps, to get just a wee bit overgrown in my own private jungle.
I should have kept records. Instead, I followed a basic rule. Stick it in, forget about it and next year do another bit. Ten years later, you walk around a corner and go ‘wow, that thing’s big’.
But trees do give up and it can happen surprisingly quickly. my favourite tree croaked last summer. It was an orchard-sized, gnarly old apple at the edge of the original garden, with its feet in the cesspit.
It was huge for an apple and put up a colossal harvest of inedible fruit every year, which was another pretty sure sign that it had grown from a pip. (Apples are weird. If they grow from seed they will be completely different from the original mummy tree, a bit like humans.)
This thing had started to lose limbs from the weight of fruit, suddenly cracking off and splitting, and then in August it curled up and died. The leaves went black.
There was no gorgeous autumn colour of decline, either.
one month it was a big living, leafy wonder and the next it was dead. It was honey fungus that did it. But there you are. As I say, we have other trees.
when the big ash right at the top, by the footpath, looked sickly and had to be cut down I had the good sense to get hold of the fallen trunk and send it off to a kiln to be dried. Then it was sawn into planks and now it is the floor of my house. It has made benches and a few bedheads and some very beautiful stools, and there is lots left over.
Trees are giving. we must revere them more.
This is sacrilege coming from a conservationist, but almost any building can be rebuilt in 12 months. A mature tree cannot really be replaced except by waiting for at least 200 years. And yet the council in Sheffield is cutting down huge trees in its leafy suburbs because they interfere with the sewers. I shudder at this casual insensitivity to venerability.
I freely admit I have stood by the side of the dank stream, which runs along my land, looking at the trees on the north edge of the field willing them on.
I have wanted the years to pass by more quickly. I was fed up with waiting: imagining what they might look like. I wanted to see the magnificent trees looming against the sky.
I actually wanted to be old and doddery and a witness to passing time. They are big now, though perhaps I am old and doddery.
HuGh Johnson, the late great wine expert, was also a tree man, on his essex plot. he pointed out that tree growth is exponential. once they get going, they expand like balloons in all directions, year on year, until eventually you can climb into them.
That may be the big thing in me. I was brought up in a wood. It goes deep. I am welsh, which goes even deeper.
once, long ago, the whole of Britain was pretty much one giant forest. I have visited an ancient place, prompted by the greatest writer on trees, oliver rackham, who directed me to Staverton Thicks in Suffolk where the trees are so old that other trees grow out of them, and so wide and wrinkly they look like rocks with bad hair. I was once taken along a path in a wood up above the river wye to look at a hazel coppice that had first started growing around the time of Christ.
I have walked into the smooth brown hollow interior of a yew in Llangernyw in North wales that the local experts thought was probably 4,000 years old until they brought in the real experts, who casually added another 500 years.
It was planted around the time that Stonehenge was built, then used to house the oil tank for the adjoining church.
I am looking at my trees as I write.
Some are at least 60ft high, especially the ones I planted from the tiniest slivers of twig, called whips. Best of all were willows. I snapped off some twigs, stuck them in bare earth. Twenty years later they are 60ft tall and clogging nearby drains with their massive moisture-seeking root systems.
Trees learn their growth rate in the first few years.
In gardens or meadows, they need to be protected from their greatest rival for moisture — grass — and the easiest way to do that is to mow the grass and pile it up around the bottom of the tree. They like the rot. It keeps them warm.
And now I can climb into the lower branches of the trees I mulched. In fact, I think that’s how I’d like to die: falling 60ft from the upper branches of a tree that I planted myself. A good turn-of-theyear thought, perhaps.