Take a leaf out of Dame Judi’s book and fall in love with trees
Venerable, adored across the generations and now radiating a sort of mystical benevolence. no, not Dame Judi Dench but the yew tree in a Surrey churchyard where she is standing.
The much-loved Dame, britain’s twinkliest thespian, really was stationed inside the trunk on Judi Dench: My Passion For Trees (bbC1). at least 1,500 years old, the yew’s colossal girth had been hollowed out in napoleonic times and a gate set into the side by a pub landlord who thought it might be handy to have a bijou beer garden next to the church.
Well, you never know when the need for a swift pint and panatella will hit you.
apparently the yew was older than the medieval church. Our pagan ancestors worshipped this tree long before they mastered ecclesiastical architecture. What delighted Dame Judi most was the cannonball found buried in the trunk: it dated to the english Civil War in the 17th century, recent history for a yew.
Dame Judi does delight quite vividly, with a girlish gasp and extra twinkling. and it’s genuine — she truly is fascinated by trees.
When she says: ‘I think of my trees as part of my extended family,’ she means it: her six-acre garden is an arboretum, a tree collection devoted to the memory of friends and loved ones.
There’s one for her late husband, the actor Michael Williams, and another, a silver birch, for a theatrical chum called Stephen: ‘It’s tall and pale, like him,’ she says with tears in her eyes.
as she spent a year observing the cycle of fresh shoots and falling leaves, a team of botanists was busy mapping her garden in 3-D on a computer.
How they did this was not explained, but the results were spectacular — by digitally measuring every twig on her oak tree, the scientists calculated its branches stretched for 12km (seven-and-a-half miles).
The shortage of factual detail was the show’s chief flaw. We were told that trees could communicate using the network of fungal threads under the woodland floor, but there was little explanation to it.
Stop-motion footage of frozen filaments called hair ice, blossoming from a rotten twig, were produced for Dame Judi to inspect on an iPad: this had never been filmed before, she was informed. There wasn’t much she could do but agree it looked lovely.
Too much time was wasted on digressions — such as a visit to see Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary rose, apparently because it was made of wood, and wood comes from trees.
It all became a bit hurried. a yew tree wouldn’t make that mistake.
There’s no hurrying romance for rhinos, as the keepers were learning in The Secret Life Of The Zoo At Christmas (C4).
beni and asha, a pair of onehorned Indian rhinos at Chester Zoo, were supposed to be a breeding pair, but asha was more interested in spa day wallows in the mudbath, and beni had taken solace in secret nuzzles with a rather flighty deer who lived next door.
If that sounds all too human, Christmas in the chimp enclosure was chaos. The dominant male had a new girlfriend and couldn’t keep his paws off her. Unsupervised, the junior chimps were fighting over their presents and eating till they passed out. That’s the true yuletide spirit.
even the caiman lizards were getting in the festive swing: the staff brought them a pyramid of golden aquatic snails piled up in a Ferrero rocher casket.
ah, ambassador... you’re spoiling those lizards.