In Normandy the garden in front of our house is overshadowed
by three huge cherry trees, but in stark contrast to the lush fecundity of more
favoured areas, here in the far north-west Highlands of Scotland, trees of any
size are a rarity and to be treasured. Most are stunted and bent by the
harshness of the climate and the poverty of the soil, but in sheltered places
some do manage to flourish.
One of those places is our front garden, where, protected
from the worst of the weather by hills on three sides, we have not only a few
small fruit trees and ornamental bushes but also a graceful silver birch. Though
nowhere near the size of its cousins further south, its beauty draws the eye in
all seasons and at all times of the day, especially in the evening as the sun
sets behind the fretwork tracery of its branches.
To me trees are one of the essentials of nature and a world
without trees a nightmare beyond imagining. Trees are the anchor of the
landscape, linking past, present and future and I love them in all their wondrous
variety of shape and type. Here is the scene I contemplated yesterday, as the last of the
sunset afterglow drained from the sky and night fell over hill, tree and water.
When I was still down in Talihina, I used to sit outside in the evenings and marvel at the Pines swaying in the wind. I miss that.
ReplyDeleteI can just see you dog that, Rubye, and can well imagine how you must miss being able to do it now. We get so attached to particular trees - like old friends.
DeleteHello Perpetua:
ReplyDeleteAs Mozart may well be considered the purest form of music, so we have always considered trees to be the purest form of gardening. If we were to make a garden again, we should in all likelihood only plant yew and box for hedges and as many trees as would be appropriate.
Oh, I just knew you two would be Mozart lovers, Jane and Lance! :-) DH would certainly agree with you about the centrality of trees to any garden, his motto being "When in doubt, plant a tree, or preferably several......"
DeleteWhen I was in Scotland this year I really missed trees. The estate I was staying on had a barren beauty but I like to hear the wind in the trees and found vast rolling hillsides, untouched by even one tree, quite intimidating.
ReplyDeleteThe empty bleakness of the Scottish landscape in some areas does take a lot getting used to, BtoB, and some people never manage it. We're lucky up here in being in a valley here trees can grow, even though there aren't huge numbers of them. The problem on the hills is that the sheep and the deer between them will destroy any unprotected baby sapling that tries to grow.
DeleteI love all trees, except Leylandii. I enjoy seeing their stark branches against the winter sky, as in your photo. Nothing cheers me more in the spring than seeing the first signs of the new buds on the trees. This past month the trees have been a joy wearing their autumn colours, I just could not imagine a world without trees.
ReplyDeleteSnap, Rosemary! Leylandii are an abomination where they are usually found, in gardens far too small for them. I think even a Leylandii would make a fine specimen tree in spacious parkland.
DeleteI will admit to a greater fondness for deciduous trees than evergreens, just because of the seasonal changes you mention, but in its proper place any tree is a pleasure to see.
I'm a little partial to my trees here too. In the heat of the Aussie summer the cool shade beneath is a haven. I love the last photo,P.
ReplyDeleteMaa
I bet you are, Maa. I would think the temperatures you get would be well-nigh intolerable without some good shade trees. Glad you like the photo. I spotted it and DH took it with his new camera. :-)
DeleteA treeless landscape is bleak, indeed, though that very bleakness can have beauty.
ReplyDeleteIf I think back to places I've lived in since childhood it is not the houses I remember first...but the gardens and the trees.
We are planting here.
A protective layer if ever the dreaded development further down the valley takes shape and ornamentals both round the house and up in the cafetal where they will also provide shade for the coffee.
Sad to think of losing the ash so soon - as I feel it - after losing thosew wonderful clumping clouds of elms.
I actually like the bare beauty very much, Fly, - like seeing the bones of a landscape - but I couldn't live permanently where there were no trees. In my mind's eye I can still see the huge sycamore down the lane from my childhood home.
DeleteI like the sound of your planting. Any chance of some pic on your blog sometime? A cafetal sounds so much more exotic than a coffee plantation. :-)
As for the ash die-back - I can hardly bear to think about it.
What a lovely lyrical post Perpetua. I do so hope your tree survives.
ReplyDeleteLike you I love trees and when you have lived with one for a long time they are almost like people, certainly friends.
The largest Leylandii I ever saw was in Eastern Europe and had the entire landscape to itself. It was magnificent, and a beautiful shape, but of course urban gardens are absolutely wrong for them.
When I worked in Greys Inn Road in the eighties, the lovely London Plane trees were a wonderful oxygen enhancing canopy until the great storm/hurricane, when several were uprooted (and the pavements with them). Life would be unthinkable without trees.
Thanks, Ray. It was already a mature tree when we bought the house almost 40 years ago and I can't imagine the place without it.
DeleteYour experience of a solitary Leylandii points up what I wrote. We need to think ahead when planting trees and be sensitive to location. Plane trees in London are an example of the right tree in the right place and I always think of the last lines of the poem by E Nesbitt which I learned at primary school: "But the plane tree's kind to the poor dull city / I love him best of all" :-)
I love trees, tall evergreens and deciduous oaks and poplars and...so many I know not their names, all crowding each other here in rain-soaked land of the Northwest United States. We have to thin out a few after a while, to keep a semblance of civilization, an opportunity to thin out those that can't withstand the strong winds, for instance.
ReplyDeleteYour post also made me nostalgic for all the fruit trees I grew up with, olives and figs and persimmons. Somehow, they keep us rooted too, asking nothing but
Rosaria, you should meet my DH, you would have a lot in common. :-) I love trees, but he is passionate about them, especially the great conifers. I even wrote a post about it early in my blog:
Deletehttp://perpetually-in-transit.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/wild-wood.html
Your part of the US sounds magnificent with its trees and coast, but I can well imagine your nostalgia for the warmth, sunlight and fruitful trees of Italy, even after so long away.
I share your love of trees Perpetua. One of the joys of living in the Czech Republic is that about 35% of the country is forested compared to no more than 10% of the UK as a whole. Too many were chopped down in the past in order to build ships for the navy :-) Like several previous commenters, I very much like your final photograph & congratulations to DH for capturing it with his new camera.
ReplyDeleteWe tree-lovers must stick together, Ricky. :-) As you know, I didn't manage to see anything of the countryside on my visits to Prague (other than the road to the airport) but I really enjoyed walking in the city parks with their magnificent trees. Being a landlocked country does have its advantages. :-)
DeleteOne of the reasons we love France is the fact it is so wooded. Even though our area is one of the least forested parts of the country, there are still trees everywhere you look.
Loved your post, Perpetua! Like the others, I sure hope your special tree survives. I really miss all the trees we had in the yard of our California home. But I am starting to appreciate the desert trees we have in our yard here in Arizona as well as the two hardy little citrus trees -- one orange and one Meyer lemon. They'll be ready to harvest in another month or so and it's always a joy.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kathy, so do I. To be honest, if the disease ever reaches as far west as Mid-Wales, the UK will have lost an enormous number of trees by that time.
DeleteYou must find the landscape and vegetation of Arizona very different from the lushness of your California garden, but it is always interesting to see very different trees, so well adapted to their environment. I just love the thought of having my own citrus trees in my garden. All I've ever had was a little Meyer lemon in a pot as a house-plant and sadly it didn't survive my ministrations very long....
I hug them. Honest. Axxx
ReplyDeleteLOL, Annie! I can just see you doing it. :-))
DeleteI love trees too...particularly the silver birch trees of my homeland, Latvia. Where I live now there are very few trees that would flourish on the mainland USA. A huge mango tree is surrounded by ten or so breadfruit trees and several coconut palms blocking my view of the wetlands beyond. It's very pretty but not as gorgeous as trees in Europe and the UK....sigh.
ReplyDeleteSilver birches are one of my favourites too, Astrid, so graceful and dainty and finely-cut. The trees you mention sound so wonderfully different and exotic to European ears, reminiscent of wonderful tropical holidays, but not like the familiar trees we grew up with, with all their seasonal variation. I can understand your sigh.....Pxxx
DeleteYour afterglow picture is beautiful. I live in the land of trees, trees of every description. I have thought of many children's stories for church, using the tree. A tree can teach us many things.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Bonnie. DH's head is getting quite swollen with all this praise of his picture. :-) From what I've seen from your blog your countryside is wonderful and of course northern latitudes have magnificent trees. Trees and seeds feature in many of the parables, so I can just hear you using them as illustrations for the children. :-)
DeleteIt's all too easy to take trees for granted, until people start chopping them down and spoiling the landscape. I enjoy looking at the trees when I'm sitting on my balcony, and can imagine how bleak the view would be without them.
ReplyDeleteI am fascinated by our fig tree. It gets cut back quite viciously every year, but always grows back stronger than ever. Even a small fig tree in the garden, which blocked the view and was cut back almost to the roots, grew even bigger this year!
Absolutely, Ayak. The view from your balcony would be so much less beautiful without the trees. Sometimes trees have to be felled for a variety of reasons, but surely not without due consideration.
DeleteYour fig tree reminds me of the self-seeded ash saplings which keep springing up in our garden in quite the wrong places. I cut them back to the ground regularly, but up they pop again, stronger than ever. :-) I think the only way to get rid of them completely would be to dig out the roots.
Of course, our deciduous trees are just coming into leaf here. I would hate to live in a barren landscape without any trees.
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely thought that is, Susan. As we see our trees losing their leaves, I shall enjoy the thought of yours coming into leaf on the other side of the world. :-) From the pictures on your blog you have the most wonderful variety.
DeleteI love the Acer in my garden although it is getting much too big now and needs cutting back. In the summer we put a table under it and have lunch there.
ReplyDeleteThis might sound strange but I always take pictures of dead trees. I think they are very beautiful in a sad way Pictures of dead trees against stormy skies are my favourites.
I know all about the problems of trees being too big, Kerry, but acers are so beautiful that it must be hard to have to cut it back.
DeleteDead trees can be very atmospheric and I can understand your fascination with them. It's the same beauty that we see in winter when trees are leafless - just the bones of a tree, so to speak.
I love trees too, especially when I spent a year in Egypt where there are only palms. Those palms got on my nerves after a while and I longed for some variety, some lush-leafed oak, elegant pine, weeping willow.
ReplyDeleteYou never appreciate what you have half so much as when you no longer have it!
Sarah, you are absolutely right! I'm trying to imagine living somewhere where there is only one kind of tree and I can't. Wherever I have visited has always had a mix of trees and, as you say, it's the contrast of size, shape and foliage which adds so much to the landscape, even a landscape as small as a garden.
DeleteGood post (about 350 words? :-) ) You are so right about the trees being essential part of our landscape, and our heritage too. I am very fearful of ash dieback and its like, not so much for me, but for next generation.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mark. Good guess, about 330 actually. I can do short too.... :-)
DeleteI remember how quickly the elm seemed to vanish from the landscape back in the 1970s, and though ash die-back may not be as virulent as Dutch elm disease, I think we will see a change in our lifetimes unless we're very lucky.
Absolutely, Perpetua. I cant imagine a world without trees. We have already lost a magnificent, very venerable sycamore to a tree fungus and a horse chestnut has had to be lopped severely because it is suffering with a weeping sore. To lose my ash trees as well would be a major disaster.
ReplyDeleteIt is so sad to see such mature and beautiful trees under threat, Friko, both in our gardens and in the countryside. From the photos on your blog, the careful positioning of trees is central to your wonderful garden and I can well understand your dread at the thought of further loss.
DeleteAs you may have guessed, we are great and abiding tree lovers here, Perpetua. Though our property has a a healthy number, we have planted several since we've moved here, knowing we will never live long enough to see their majesty but firm in our resolve to make certain there are trees for the next generation.
ReplyDeleteOur sycamore trees are magnificent. I believe they are the same as your plane trees.
Your words read like a prayer, Perpetua. I particularly appreciated this:
"To me trees are one of the essentials of nature and a world without trees a nightmare beyond imagining. Trees are the anchor of the landscape, linking past, present and future and I love them in all their wondrous variety of shape and type. . . " Thank you.
Two acres of leaves, Penny? I never would have guessed! :-) I love the way we can plant for future generations and DH has done a lot of that over the years. The quicker growing conifers are already magnificent specimens, but the broadleaves will take much longer.
DeleteYes, I think the American sycamore is the same as our plane tree and we have wonderful European sycamores also. Sadly my research has shown that there is a disease which attacks plane trees that is spreading north through Europe and could see the city plane trees of northern Europe disappear.
Thank you for your words of appreciation. They mean a lot.
Dear Perpetua, I thought I'd left a comment here yesterday, but apparently I didn't. For me, trees are an essential of life. While taking a creative writing class in college, I wrote a fable that I entitled "Innocence is Evergreen." It's main character was an evergreen tree. A very young one. I still have a copy of that story and I still respond to Evergreen's innocence. Peace.
ReplyDeleteYou commented on my previous post yesterday, Dee, which is probably what confused you. Son't worry - I'm easily confused myself nowadays. :-)
DeleteIt's no surprise to me that you love trees too. I could have guessed hat from your writing and your approach to the natural world. We tree-lovers have a lo to do to protect that which we love.
I really love trees, too, and agree with you entirely that without them it would be a bleak landscape. I love our backyard oak tree, and I've had similar thoughts to what you express about the potential loss of your ash tree. It would devastate me! I do think you live with such a gorgeous landscape, and yet as lush as it is, the loss of any tree is still experienced as loss. I think the beauty of the natural landscape is such a wonderful gift from God. :-)
ReplyDeletehaving see your posts and pictures of your backyard oak, I can understand why you love it, Debra. I think we see trees like this as individuals, not just past of the mass and identify with them. We are very lucky in Britain to have a wonderfully green and varied landscape in which trees play a very big role and they truly are indispensable.
DeleteYes, yes, I so agree on the necessity of trees! Our ash trees are few and far between but I cherish each of them; they have become some of my favourite trees. A friend in the Forestry Commission, who has been involved in the surveys of ash dieback, says that it is inevitable that almost all the ash in Britain will die within 50 years. We just have to hope that some will develop immunity to the disease. It would be very sad indeed if you were to lose your lovely Welsh ash.
ReplyDeleteI love to take holidays to pared-down, windswept, almost treeless parts of Britain: Wigtownshire, Orkney, the Hebrides. I don't think I could be really happy, though, living in a landscape without trees. Here we are abundantly blessed: I often think that our castle is like the castle in 'Sleeping Beauty', encircled, protected and hidden by great trees. Vast redwoods, firs and spruce of all sorts (Grand, Noble, Silver, Serbian, Sitka etc.) tower above the ancient yews and broadleafs, oak, lime, sycamore, gean, sweet chestnut, beech etc. I love them all (well, OK, I love the deciduous ones more on the whole!) and each loss to storm, age or illness is a cause for mourning.
I thought this post would get you going, DB, with your deep love of trees which shines out of your blog. :-) I'm very sad that your Forestry Commission friend takes such a gloomy view of the probable effect of ash die-back. How can it be that two such iconic trees as the ash and the elm could be almost erased from the British landscape within a century?
DeleteYour trees sound wonderful and we really must take you up on your invitation to call in on one of our journeys through Perthshire, so that DH can revel in your trees to his heart's content, while you and I set the world to rights. :-)
Yes, please do one day!
DeleteI'll hold you to that, DB. :-)
Delete